Guest Post by Ivie from Homeschool on the Range
Yvie practices the art of simple living with her chickens, goats, dogs, rabbits, and house full of boys in rural America. She loves acoustic guitar, historical novels, and anything with dark chocolate! You can find her at Homeschool On the Range, or on Facebook and Instagram.
It’s human nature to remember the bad more vividly than the good – it’s how we evolved to make sure we stayed safe – by remembering those negative experiences vividly so that we could avoid them in the future.
However, with the advent of massive connectivity, negativity now surrounds us from every direction….and it’s pervasive. Turn on the television, tune into social media, or pick up a paper and you’ll typically be bombarded with negativity.
Those messages eventually affect our brains, causing us to focus more on the negative…..and if they’re doing that to our brains, imagine what they’re doing to our children’s brains!
Time for a Change….
Back in January of 2016, after a particularly grueling year, my husband and I decided that it was time for a change. The primaries and election were going on in America, which meant people were being blasted with negative messages on a minute by minute basis, and we needed to re-center. We HAD to relearn to focus on the positive side of life.
After implementing this small change, we noticed a difference in both our attitudes, and in our children’s attitudes, toward life’s little issues…
Birth of a Box…
The “Friday Box” was born. Each Friday, everyone was responsible for writing down one good thing (little or big) that they wanted to remember from that week. The memory could be something as simple as a special lunch out, or a big thing like a fun experience at overnight camp. It usually falls somewhere in between, and three years into the tradition, there are often two or three memories written down each week!
Even when we travelled quite a bit on Gypsy Road, we took slips of paper to continue the tradition and then put them into the box once back home.
Now, each year, on the last Friday of December, after filling out our slips, we take turns reading off all of the slips of paper from the box and remembering the good times from the year. The vast majority of them are about little things, and good times, and we spend well over two hours just reminiscing about the good times we’ve experienced together.
Giggles and laughter, smiles all around…those are the things that I want to remember. The “Friday Box” tradition is here to stay at our house. Will you start it at yours?
