Our Weekly Family Meeting

hudson’s similar hoodie + jeans  |  hunter’s top + jeans  |  harper’s similar dress + top + boots  |
my top + jeans  |  joe’s similar top  |  houston’s similar top  |  hayden’s similar top + jeans  ||
stools + step stool

Let’s talk family planning! Whether you are single, married, or a family of 7, planning out your week can make all the difference in not only your productivity, but your attitude too! Knowing what you have coming up as well as making time for the things you want in your week can make all the difference between a happy week or a bummer week! I mentioned we have a family meeting every Sunday and got bombarded with questions on all the logistics of how it is done. So today I’m giving you all the details and hopefully setting you up with some tips to apply this in your own household!

: START WITH FAMILY HOME EVENING

We usually start our family meeting off with what we call family home evening. It is something we are encouraged to do through our faith, but easily customized to coincide with your own family values. We try to start off with a prayer and a song. From then on, it is basically a time where we focus on being together, talking about a subject we need to work on or want to focus on that week. Sometimes it will just be Joe or I kind of leading a discussion and other times we watch a spiritual video or talk on it as well.

Once we have done this portion of the family meeting, we let the babies go play. They don’t need to know the ins and outs of the schedule and sometimes it helps with distractions. Our babies are old enough now that a lot of times they like to stay to be included.

: GO OVER THE SCHEDULE

Once we wrap up the family home evening portion, we move on to the schedule. The schedule portion of the family meeting is definitely the main focus and what takes the most time.

This is where we go over everything like sports practices and games, joe’s work days, and any meetings or appointments I have that will affect family schedules. This is also when the kids let us know if they have special things with friends like birthday parties or school events.

We also schedule in our kids dates for the week. These don’t always have to be something huge. Lately I have been picking up whoever’s turn it is and taking them to lunch, a lot of the time with the babies in tow. They don’t really mind that it isn’t always just one on one.

In addition to the individual kids dates, we also try and schedule in some kind of family activity or family date for the week. This could be something as big as skiing for Harper’s birthday, or as simple as everyone going to Hunter’s soccer game to support her.

The last part of scheduling is us letting them know if Joe and I have a date night planned for the week and who is going to tend.

: PLAN OUR MEALS 

One of my biggest pet peeves is spending time and/or money to make a meal that nobody wants to eat! So when it comes to meal planning for the week I want all the opinions and requests! To make this happen, I added meal planning for the week to our weekly family meeting. We are able to plan out what days we will be out, what days Joe will be home for dinner, and work in any meal requests the kids have. I usually order our Walmart delivery right then as well to get it all taken care of!

: TALK ABOUT OUR GOALS 

New to our family meeting this year is adding in family goals. Our kids are old enough to be making their own goals as well as work towards goals with us toward family ones too. We talked about them last week and we each listed them out on these monthly sheets. Our plan is to go over them every week at the family meeting as kind of a check in. Not only does that help us stay focused on the goals, but also lets us see if we can be helping them out that week in their goals.

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I think that covers everything involved in our weekly family meeting. As you can the bones of it are really pretty simple and customizable to your families needs!