"Love at Home" sign and activity

While Valentine’s Day is usually a time for romantic love, I like to concentrate on love in general, since we have little kids in the house.  

I made this sign to help us focus on God’s love for us and the love in our family.  It quotes one of my favorite songs, “Love at Home”. I took this phrase from the last verse, which is one of my favorites.  It says “Oh, there’s One who smiles on high, when there’s love at home.”

I painted a 12x12 board with pink paint and then just cut out the words on my silhouette and applied them.  I drilled some holes in the board and hung it from a ribbon. Not very fancy, but I like it fine.

I talked to the kids about how it makes God happy when we have a happy home, which can be achieved by being considerate of each other and serving each other in our family.  I told them that when I saw them doing something that helps bring love into our home, they could put up a paper heart.  

The kids were very excited to start.  The first morning at breakfast, I mentioned that we still needed spoons on the table, and the 3 older kids all jumped up from their seats and raced to the utensil drawer.  I then explained that we weren’t going to fight over who got to do service, and that it’s also creating love in our home when someone lets someone else do something they wanted to do. 

Originally I was writing on the hearts who had done what to get the heart as a record of the kind acts I was seeing, but I soon found that the kids thought it was some kind of a competition and I kept hearing “I have more hearts than you now!” which was not the intent of the activity.  So I had to explain that when the wall is full of hearts, we are all winners regardless of who did the most kind acts, and also that when you do a kind act to try and beat someone else it doesn’t really count.  Who knew this would be so complicated?  Now we just put up blank hearts, and I hope they have stopped keeping score.  

I think this will be a fun activity for us leading up to Valentine’s Day.