A Few of the Finer Things - March 2016

This past month Debbie and I took our kids on our 7^th annual family retreat, a program through our temple geared toward reinforcing family time and disconnecting from our normal busy lives. We spent the weekend at Camp Shadow Pines in Heber, AZ, which is a short 2 ½ hour drive northeast of Phoenix. Debbie and her three children began attending the retreat in 2008. Once we married we all started joining the fun. This past retreat, like so many others, was a fantastic time! We enjoyed playing games with other families, singing songs (as a few of us played guitars) and participating in the various activities planned. This year’s retreat theme was LOVE. One of our favorite activities was creating a family “contract” of qualities we hope to emulate…things like love, responsibility, inclusiveness, honesty, communication and hard work—we summed it up with an art project that will hang in our home.

Our kids now range in age from 13 to almost 21 and although all of them look forward to the retreat every year, three of them were unable to make the trip due to prior obligations (college, high school sports, leadership conference). We noticed this year that there were a lot more families with preschool and young elementary aged children. As we began to grimace at all the noise and chaos, we sat back and realized that those families used to be us…we are aging out of the family retreat a bit, but it is still a fun and meaningful weekend for us and we will continue going until all of our kids are grown and out of the house. The youth group director who began coordinating this event as a single twenty-something is now married with a one-year old child of her own. She and her husband commented to our youngest boys that they were only six years old the first time this couple met them (and pointed to some six-year olds there for full effect)…it is hard to believe how the time does fly. We were pleased to know that these new families will help carry on the spirit that we have enjoyed so much over the years.

Our kids have so many memories of these trips—the year that it snowed like crazy, the year that I hurt myself playing football with the kids, the year they did a certain act in the talent show…the stories go on and on.

It has been a wonderful experience being a part of something like a community that is bigger than ourselves. The family retreat has been a way for us to reinforce our family values that we want to teach to our children and to build lasting memories that will hopefully make them want to continue this type of tradition someday with families of their own. I highly recommend the experience if you have an opportunity like this one.

- Gary Weiss, March 2016