Family Fun Friday

Yes!! It's Family Fun Friday!

Several years ago, I felt the need to start some really fun traditions for our young family. I wanted to find things that we could look forward to regularly and come to depend on and find comfort and togetherness in. "Family Fun Friday" was born out of this longing.

For us, Family Fun Friday (which we ALWAYS call it) means that I'll be making my homemade pizza and we'll do some cozy and fun things together as a family here at home, typically. Sometimes we'll play a board game or two (we have LOADS...some of our favorites are Cranium Family Fun, Scattergories, Rummicube and Mad Gab), perhaps go for a swim in our pool and enjoy a rousing game of beach ball volleyball, maybe watch a DVD together.

As our children have gotten older we'll tweak Family Fun Friday a little bit to add some pizzazz. For example, an addition we included within this past year was that every Family Fun Friday each family member can--ahem--burp and fart without having to say excuse me. Rofl. Seriously. It's not just a casual thing in passing. Oh no! Because we typically appreciate and require the standard good manners that go along with such an event it seems to have become a sort of contest to see how 'good' of an explosion everyone can conjure up. I'm known amongst my family members for being the sorriest burper to ever walk the planet, by the way...but I digress.

It's incredible to think about how I've been making these homemade pizzas most every Friday for EIGHT years! Our son was in kindergarten we we started the tradition and he'll be in his last year of middle school soon, for goodness sake! It's been something special that we've all shared together during this time and hopefully we'll be blessed with many more Family Fun Fridays together. It's all about the importance of family togetherness--sharing and SHOWING our love for one another through good times--by TAKING the time to be together despite all of those things that 'have to get done.'

I'm a firm believer that a truly healthy and happy lifestyle includes, of course, the very important elements of healthy eating and of physical fitness but also of love and of relationships. For me, those important relationships are with God, with my husband, with our 3 fantastic children, our extended family and our friends. We so often think of love as a feeling...cause it so often feels GREAT! But "love" is actually an ACTION! You won't always be feeling top notch, feeling all peachy or feeling 'in love' but you can overcome the feelings of negativity by focusing on the relationships in your life and by bestowing acts of love upon the people you care about. Family traditions are a great way to pull all of that together and make sure that you're all making special time for eachother.

Working out faithfully and eating healthfully also go hand in hand with consistently feeling better. The better you feel the more well-equipped you are to give of yourself. Matt and I were really tired yesterday but made a pact with eachother that we'd get our P90X workouts done and boy did we ever feel GREAT afterward! Exercise is PROVEN to make you feel better. If you haven't deduced already, I'm a BeachBody Coach and genuinely want to help as many people as I can make that positive change in their lives by finding a fitness regimine that you actually like and will stick with...it's a lifetime change, afterall! P90X is absolutely fantastic but there are people of all types; as such, we've got programs of all types for all different likes.

Incidentally, my focus in making these homemade pizzas is to make them as healthfully as I can and still end up with a super tasty pie that everyone in the family loves! The children still, typically, enjoy a plain cheese or a pizza with a few pepperoni sprinkled on it but I make whole wheat crusts. Matt and I particularly like the thin crusts and, for ours, I'll often throw cut spinach leaves, artichoke hearts, roasted red peppers, mushrooms, black olives and just a LIGHT sprinking of mozzarella cheese on there with a slight dusting of feta cheese and a weensy dribble of olive oil over the top. The flavor is incredible, we hit most of the major food groups, the health value is high and it's just such fun!

I'd be happy to share my homemade pizza recipe if there's interest. Y'all just leave me some comments at the bottom of this post. Also drop me a line to learn more about the BeachBody fitness programs we have available...you can also just pop directly over to my site at www.beachbodycoach.com/LisaErin (please make sure you type in that last bit...the /LisaErin part).

So, to you and your relationships: Here's to staying healthy and rejoicing in the love that's all around and within us!~~Slainte!~~