Family Mission: Complete

We did it.  We created Our Family Mission (say it with an echo to herald its importance).

If you recall, the family mission development began when I read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families.  I joined an online book club, that I loved for 3 weeks, then had to slack off on due to increased responsibilities around here and decreased time  to accomplish my tasks (something about sick kids and snow storms for an entire month, but I'm SO over it).

But the mission.  The mission!  We kept at it.  Every week we did the next step, whittled down, expanded where necessary, talked, analyzed, giggled.  Because it was a lot of fun!  Family mission development with a Mom, Dad, 7 year old and 2 year old is definitely interesting!

So without further ado, I give it to you:

Our #1 priority is to love and respect each other.  

We do this through having fun, being kind, listening to and supporting each other's feelings and decisions.  


We are honest and have a home with Christian values.


We will spend our lives educating ourselves and learning new things.


We love music and animals.


I'm sure it will evolve over time.  It's a little generic sounding, but truthfully, these are the words (italicized) that we all wrote down.  Like any good business, we should have a yearly evaluation of it to see if it still fits us.  I'm sure as the girls grow, we'll add some things like, "we will not kiss boys until we are married to them," or "negative peer pressure in any way is for complete idiots" and stuff like that.  :)

But for a first pass, we like it.  No, we love it.  It makes us feel complete, whole, unified toward a common purpose - supporting each other in all things.  And as it says at the top, "giving each other love and respect."

What was our process?

Week 1 - Discussion about why we love our home (And to be honest, this first conversation almost made me stop the process.  The girls were too silly and Husband was "just not that into it," if you know what I mean.  But because I am a Taurus, I pressed on.)
Week 2 - Each person listed 5 words or phrases that described what our family represents (or wanted it to represent).
Week 3 - I presented the tally of words and phrases (you would be shocked how much overlap there was).
Week 4 - We cut the ones we didn't need or that were superfluous.
Week 5 - I wrote it up two ways and presented it to the group.  This is the one we picked.

What do you think?  Have you ever done one?  For those who already told me you haven't, does the process interest you?  Do you think it's crazy to treat your home like a business?  Share with me.


**I'll say, in conclusion, that I don't like calling it the mission statement and we will likely discuss what we should call it in the next week or so.**