Disciplining children can be hard because you want your kids to be brought up thr right way but maybe we don't always know how to go about doing that, or every child is different, or we might be wrong.  I think discipline is important but more importantly how it's done.  I don't know the right way to do it and I wish too that there was a mannual that came with each kid so that we would know.  There are things however that I think are important to teach kids and those I learned from my parents.  I think it's important to teach your children how to work and teach them the worth of a dollar.  Give them opportunities to learn and grow by making these type of decisions on their own so that they can learn from the concequences of their actions.  I really liked talking today about natural concequences and not to focus on bad behavior because it reinforces it.  I am nervous about doing everything perfectly but I'll just do my best cuz no one is perfect. :)

Today we discussed with partners in class some good ideas that we've gathered either from our readings or from our own families the things that we want to incoorporate for our children.  I really liked what my partner said about having her family work outside or on projects together.  I do think it's important for families to work together  in a sense that they share experiences with one another that bond them together so that they feel emotionally closer to one another.  This is definitely something that I want to do with my own family.  I want my family to work hard together, play hard together, and be happy together.

Today in class we talked about the roles of men and women and which one works and who stays home and the trends that there have been in the past.  I personally think that women should raise their own kids but, I also think it's important for them to have time for themselves and maybe have some kind of job on the side.  I also think that it ends up benefitting the kids as well because then they have that opportunity to socialize in a day care.  My mom worked and was also a great mom!  Course she did have the perfect job for it since she only taught half a day's worth of school, kindergarten.  She was home when we were home and had summers, weekends, holidays, and nights off to spend with the family.  I too want to work like my mom and also be a great mom.  I currently work at Gold's gym and so in the future when I have kids I will take them to the day care there at the gym while I teach or I will plan my classes and personl training sessions around my kids school activities.  I think it's important for everyone to do something for themselves especially mothers, I think it's only when they do something for themselves that they become the best mom's and happy people to be around. 

So on my last post I said I was going to do an experiment with my non verbal communication.  I noticed some pretty interesting outcomes.  I noticed that when I was fully engaged with my non verbal communication and keeping eye contact the people that I talked to had a lot more to say.  It was almost as if they were giving me more details and telling me more of the story/conversation.  Whereas if I wasn't engaged non verbally and just engaged with comments like yes, uh huh, hmm, but I wasn't keeping eye contact or engaged by my actions (which was actually hard to do) the conversations seemed to end sooner and were a lot shorter and less detailed.  It was kind of fun to do this and just experiment on people.  It was intersting cuz I actually felt bad for not engaging in some of my close friends conversations so I actually turned it around at the end of the conversation which also was interesting.  One seemed suprised that I actually heard what was being said hahaha.

I thought it was interesting how we talked about communication today and how people are more liekly to believe non-verbal  communication than verbal.  All day I've been watching people's communications and their actions and how true this is.  This week I'm going to do some experiments with non verbal and verbal communication :) I'm going to experiment listening to people's conversations and truly engaging in them and then I'm going to listen to people's comversations and not fully engage and compare the responses with each.  Will report back my findings!  Should be interesting!

This week I took notes when talking about marriage and the relationship between spouses.  I thought it was really interesting that just alone being aware of what we talked about helps your chances of overcoming and preventing those things we talked about from happening to your marriage.  I came home and shared my notes with my husband and we talked about the things that were discussed in class.  It makes a lot of sense to both of us and we talked about how we could maybe help those in our family who may be in need of the same knowledge.  So grateful for the communication that my spouse and I are able to share and that we are open and talk to each other about things.  I know it's important in a relationship and that it's been important in my own relationship.

Weddings and the stress that they can cause on a family and maybe some advice to those who still have this to look forward to!  Let somebody else take charge and plan your wedding and don't be too picky!  hahaha My wedding was honestly stress FREE for me.  Not sure about my mother but I do know that she had lots of friends that helped her and I who pitched in and offered their help freely.  I was really lucky and fortunate to have my wedding be as stressless as it was.  I'm also so lucky that my mom pretty much took care of the planning and things that needed to get done.  She would come home with all these great ideas and stuff and ask me what I thought so it wasn't like I didn't get to have it my way.  I wasn't very picky at all though.  If it looked nice and it was cheap I loved it seeing as how my dad gave me a budget to work with for my wedding (even though I didn't really work with the budget my mom did) and then what was ever left over I got to have in cash!  What an incentive to having a cheap wedding right?  Weddings can still be nice and classy and still be cost effecient!  Especially when you have the help and service of so many friends and family.  We had a wonderful temple sealing, the most beautiful reception outside with the nature of my mother's flower beds being pretty much decorations.  We got nice picture frames for center peices and my colors were brown and pink so my mom planted all brown and pink flowers that year to match.  Try to incorporate as much family and friends as you can for your wedding!  Make it stress free so that you can enjoy that wonderful day!  Don't sweat the small stuff and remember what's important!

Well this week we talked a lot about dating and well maybe it's because I'm not in this stage anymore but there were things that I agreed with and there were things that I disagreed with.  I can't remember all the comments that I disagreed with but, it was probably because I'm no longer in that stage of life.  There were things however, that I did agree with and those were the three "P's" I think dating is super important and I do agree with the fact that the youth no longer date, they more so just hang out.  I think it's important to date and for couples to be paired off, that the date is planned from begining to end, and that it is paid for or the couples know how it will be paid for.  I think that if prophets are telling us we need to date then we should be!  It must be important or else why would they take the time to talk about it?

Today's disscussion was pretty intense yeah?  Talking about gender bahaviors has opened my eyes how they relate so much to family.  I found myself sitting in class saying things to myself like "yeah I do that, or yeah I've done that before."  For example, I give my little brother in-law a hard time for "being such a girl" and liking girly things.  Shame on me!!  If anything this class has been beneficial to me in my own life in way that I did not expect.  I guess we're all apart of the things around us even if we don't want to be.  My eyes have been opened to the fact that what I say and do around others always has an effect and I need to be a little wiser in acknowledging that.  It's so interesting to me that we can reinforce behaviors that we don't ourselves may not agree with, without even realizing it. 

We talked about Genograms this week and I thought it was really interesting to see the  similarities and differences that Brother William's genogram displayed.  I'm excited to do my own because I would like to see what kind of similarities and differences that my own family has. 

I am debating about which route I should go though.  Any advice would be nice!  My mom was adopted and normally I would go with the family who raised her and well the people I know as my Grandparents and Relatives.  But, my mom has also has some health issues come up in her life and I kind of wanted to see if there were any similarities within that part of her biological background.  What do you think?

We've been talking a lot about Family Systems this past week and how they have boundaries, rules, and roles.  It's interesting to be viewing the family in this way and is something that I haven't ever done.  It was kind of fun to see how many families have rules and that they are very different.  In some families the rules are more easy going and unspoken and in other families they are more obvious and loud.  It was interesting to see the different rules other families had in comparison to my own families rules. 

I never really thought about the rules in my family until this past week.  There are the more obvious ones such as, curfew, chores, and the way the house is ran.  Then as we progressed throughout the week I started to notice rules and behaviors that my family has that I had never thought about before from the fact that we don't lock up to if there's left over restaurant food in the fridge and it's not yours DON'T EAT IT!  It was interesting to view some different rules in my family that I never before really viewed as rules. 

This week there were many things that opened my eyes but I think the main one was childbearing.  After watching the Demographic Winter and talking with my husband; it made me realize that we were letting the world's view on bearing children change our minds on how many kids we would like to have.  It's not that we ever felt the same way the world did about bearing children it was more about we lost sight of why it is important to bring children into the world. 
Realizing that this has happened, almost without us realizing that it happened, has been a wake up call for me.  I don't want to fail to do what's right just because I loose sight of what's important.