{"id":68,"date":"2024-06-30T13:18:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-30T13:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/malachirsmith.com\/?p=68"},"modified":"2025-04-07T16:45:20","modified_gmt":"2025-04-07T16:45:20","slug":"family-meetings-and-manners-challenges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malachirsmith.com\/?p=68","title":{"rendered":"Month 1: Family Meetings and Manners Challenges"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>For my first Apogee character challenge, I led family meetings once a week, discussing a set of rules as well as determining how well we followed those rules in the past seven days. We created four core rules and awarded ourselves two points for each rule we followed that week. As the introductory challenge, it set the tone of what I would be doing without being difficult or daunting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The rules were (1) Love with your thoughts, words, and actions, (2) Be quick to apologize and quicker to forgive, (3) Obey the first time you\u2019re asked, and (4) Work first, then play. These rules are now hung on the wall for everyone to see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I took notes from all four meetings detailing what we did, how well the meeting progressed, and our thoughts on the past week&#8217;s behavior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Meeting 1 (6\/10\/24): Created the first version of our family rules; it is subject to change. We decided fewer, simpler rules were better for all the little kids. I led this meeting, as I will the others. It went alright, with my mom being the biggest help in creating the rules and keeping order among the siblings. They were impatient to get back to playing so controlling them and getting them to help with the rules was a large issue. However, it was done in a relatively short amount of time and was successful in its purpose.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Meeting 2 (6\/16\/24): The two older girls were gone this week, so in this meeting, we briefed them on the rules and took their input. There was no change to the rules from either them or the rest of us. We graded our performance and awarded ourselves with two points for all four of the rules. We relied heavily on parental input to make sure we were not taking it easy on ourselves, especially on rule #3. Mom even gave extra credit to the younger girls for how they willingly and cheerfully took over the jobs usually done by the older two girls, due to their absence. 8\/8 week and the meeting was successful with much more cooperation and attention than the previous one.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Meeting 3 (6\/23\/24): Busy week, several of the girls were gone for most of the day on Tuesday and Wednesday. This meant there were less interactions than usual. Additionally, the parents went on an anniversary trip from Friday afternoon to Sunday morning, so the youngest was in charge of the third oldest since the oldest and I worked on Saturday. It was a 7.5\/8 week, with half a point taken off on obeying the first time, due to small amounts of misbehavior on Saturday. Regardless it was a good week, and the meeting went smoothly and quickly.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Meeting 4 (6\/30\/24): Mom was on a trip for two days of the week, so responsibilities were shifted to the older girls, both in housekeeping and watching over the kids. It was an 8\/8 week though; perhaps we learned from our previous mistakes over the parents\u2019 anniversary trip.\u00a0 Overall the month was very good, with only half a point taken off the entire time. We discussed, in this last meeting, what everyone thought of the rules and if they changed anything.<br><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Final notes: We are a Christian and pastor\u2019s family, so godly living is a major part of our life. I wanted to gather input from the family on what these rules did in our lives throughout this month. Everyone agreed on this question. These rules created extra accountability, summarized and verbalized our daily actions into words readily accessible to all, and helped us to reflect on how we lived our week. These rules reminded us of how we were supposed to live, meaning they did not exactly change how we lived. Instead, it sharpened and fine-tuned our weeks, which was of course very beneficial to all of us.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Manners Matter Challenge<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Most of us have dozens of interactions with other people every day and we often forget to act properly in those short, quick moments. Even if we feel like those instances are meaningless, your manners make a huge impression on those around you. This challenge had me address everyone as &#8220;sir&#8221; and &#8220;ma&#8217;am&#8221;, shake hands, make eye contact, open doors for women, watch my language, and use &#8220;thank you&#8221; and &#8220;you&#8217;re welcome&#8221; when relevant. Although these practices were almost completely habit for me, this challenge helped me to see where I was forgetting to use proper manners and address those mistakes. It was a very worthwhile introductory project for this course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For my first Apogee character challenge, I led family meetings once a week, discussing a set of rules as well as determining how well we followed those rules in the past seven days. We created four core rules and awarded ourselves two points for each rule we followed that week. As the introductory challenge, it&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apogee-character-challenges"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/malachirsmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/malachirsmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/malachirsmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malachirsmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malachirsmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/malachirsmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74,"href":"https:\/\/malachirsmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions\/74"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/malachirsmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malachirsmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malachirsmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}