Answers

To answer the travel question, I think where we want to go on our next vacation is to Hawaii to visit our friends the Skafs who just moved back there. They met at BYU Hawaii and Daniel just finished his Master's degree (his MFA) in documentary film here in So-Cal. They were in our ward until a few weeks ago.

Another trip I'd like to take is to Germany. I want to go with Jared to do family history research. I have to study up on my German first though. I think Laurel and I both have places we want to visit someday: my mission in Hong Kong, New York City, Southern Europe (for all the art and history). But for now our priority is on building our family and establishing our home here in the USA.

To answer Trina's questions: We have family home evening together. We never did get into the combined thing for whatever reason, though we've considered it a few times. I think we did get together with a bunch of couples in our current ward for an FHE once or twice a few years ago, but generally we just have family night with the two of us. Anyway, we hold it on Monday night. We recently decided to alternate being in charge of family night. That means one of us puts the whole thing on, picks songs, teaches the lesson, etc. We used to be big into refreshments, but recently we've laid off the ice cream and whatnot. It's an option, but it can get a bit, er, fattening.

We used to plan FHE about a month out, usually on Sundays when we were thinking about that sort of thing. Recently we planned all our family activities and FHEs for three months out (mid-July through mid-October). I think we both felt the pregnancy was going by very fast, and we wanted to make sure we did everything we wanted to do.

So we planned lesson topics for each week, and then we added activities. The way we planned the lesson topics was by alternating weeks. Laurel had a bunch of topics she wanted to address, and I had my own set, so we just went back and forth until the calendar was filled. Occasionally we switched weeks because of some significant thing happening (the temple or our hospital tour), but it works out nicely. The activities for the next few months generally revolve around projects that we're working on anyway, like the quilt and the birthday cards, and some other things we're making for the baby.

So that's it. I think it's very important to hold family home evenings for yourselves, even if you don't have kids. There are a tremendous amount of resources out there, and you have all your own creativity as well. Have fun!