tonight we had our young womens new beginnings evening to start off our year with the girls. our presidency got together to think of an idea and something suddenly popped into my head. i had seen a super cute idea a friend of mine had done with her ward a year or two ago involving the theme "donut forget" with a donut board and other cool stuff. so i went looking online for ideas of how we could do it for our evening.
it suddenly came to me and i realised i could put my relief society lesson, that became a stake conference talk one last time. we would have the girls speak about "donut forget the things that matter most" each of the 8 things i had spoken about could be likened to a young womens value.
faith - prayer
divine nature - attending our church meetings
individual worth - attending the temple
knowledge - scriptures
choice & accountability - paying an honest tithe
good works - family home evening
integrity - fasting
virtue - keeping the commandments
we assigned each of our laurels to speak for 2 minutes of one of those assigned topics and it was awesome to see what they came up with. i was so impressed with them.
we then had each of the new beehives introduced to us by their mothers, speaking of likes and dislikes, favourite things, fun memories. it's definitely something we will continue to do each year, it was worth it for the laughs!
we also introduced our girls to the possibility of completing their personal progress this year. we know that the program will be made obsolete at the end of this year to make way for a new youth program, so we wanted to make sure they were aware, in case any one wants to finish it off (or start and finish it off haha.) that will be me, i have never finished mine so i am excited to do so.
we located a sheet online here, that allows you to complete the entire thing in 12 weeks (with the exception of the 10 hour projects), so once they knew it really is possible, we challenged them all to do so over the course of this year. i'm hoping they take it up!
refreshements were a whole of things that had a donut shape, or actual donuts. yum! you can also find the cute (and free!) donut printables we used here.
it was a great night, but the thing i loved the most, was watching each of the girls receive one of these amazing cookies, (custom made by baked on benrua) with the gold torch logo and a matching pendant at the end of the evening. it was the best. i love that we gave them something meaningful and i really feel like they ended the evening feeling encouraged to go and do something this year!
