Cherish your Cherubs project: WRITE messages of love

If you have just discovered my blog or are dropping by after some time away, every Monday for the next couple of weeks I am running a Cherish your Cherubs Project here on my blog. A little project to help us appreciate and adore our children/cherubs more and a way to record and remember them in our lives. Every week other bloggers link up and share how they have gone in their lives and so far we have done:

Week 1 - Record

Week 2 - Remember

Week 3 - Interview

Week 4 - Praise.

Last week I was touched to read about the ways and lengths you go to as mothers to help your cherubs feel important, to have a healthy self esteem and the effort you put in to cater to the different ages and stages of your children's lives. Inspiring ladies, inspiring!

This week the topic was WRITE and I wanted to encourage you to spend some time writing out your feelings to your cherubs and to send some love messages to them. Some of the suggestions were:

Write them a letter, leave a note on a pillow, hide a note in a lunch box, make a poster etc.

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One of the things I do as a mother that my cherubs love is when I pick up a packet of Love Notes from the shops (Woolworths $1.99 I think!) to leave on each pillow for them to find when they get home from school. I often leave a little handwritten note along with it to help them feel special. As I just have Liberty at home with me, her assignment is to go around and place each treat on or under all of the pillows and my assignment is to write the notes. Often I also get her to put the notes out as well to keep her busy. Amazingly she always leaves the treats there for them to find when they get home from school.  Liberty loves it and has so much trouble not telling them as soon as they get in the car at school pick up.

We are also big on surprises and making posters to celebrate achievements and welcome home moments in our house.  As I often leave notes of love around the house for family members I am always delighted when my cherubs decide to do the same back to me. Love finding a toy or a note or even a small chocolate under my pillow when I go to get into bed at night.

This week instead of showing you notes that I have written or pictures of posters that we have made, I have decided to show you how as a family we used writing to do a family activity. This activity of creating a family word tree was fun and helped us all to write and focus on words that describe all of us as a family. It was a lovely reminder that we are trying our best and that we are a great fun family.

To start with we cut out circles of paper to hang on our tree. We punched a hole in each circle and thread through some ribbon so that we could hang them up all over our tree. For our tree we used a large branch that was painted white. We placed the branch in a bucket, with large stones to hold it in place and stood it in our entrance way for us to see every day when we arrived home from being out somewhere.

We then sat down with our circles of paper and wrote on them words that described out family. We came up with a large list: Active, Beautiful, Awesome, Messy, Kind, Good, Honest and Creative to name a few.

We had a great time laughing over the words we chose to share and when we had finished we hung each word on our tree. The children loved doing the activity and it was a really simple fun way to use words and to write how we see our family. For the younger children it was a wonderful way to explain to them what some of the words mean and why we thought it fitted our family.

I hope that you have been enjoying the last couple of weeks with spending a little more time focusing on your cherubs and now, it is time to move onto what I would love for you to do for Week 6. Affection. This is the last week! So sad for me.

For the next week I would love for you to work on showing some more affection to your cherubs. As a parent I believe that physical touch plays a big role in how children feel about themselves and affects the way they move into relationships they have in the future. Showing affection can sometimes be hard for some of us as mother's, especially if you may have been raised where it was not a big thing to show affection to each other or even if you have a child that does not like touching or hugs.

There are several ways that you can go about showing affection to children in a healthy way and they involve spending time hugging, patting, rocking, cuddling, holding hands or even brushing their hair. Affection for me is all about touch and gentleness and kindness. It is about reaching out to our children and bringing them into our own personal space and holding them close in some way. Affection is also about understanding how your individual children love to have affection shown to them. Some of my cherubs love tight squishy hugs and others just love an arm around them.

When we show affection to our children they feel loved and worthy. They know that we care about them and showing affection to older children can sometimes be a little bit more of a challenge. Some children I think go through a phase where it is not cool for mum or dad to be laying on the affection and it is important during this time that they know you are there for them. There will be times when they will need that hug or hand holding for support and added reassurance, even if they don't think they need it.

I decided to do some research on ways to show affection to your children and when I typed that search topic into google I was really surprised to see my own blog show up. Haha! I totally forgot that I wrote a blog post for my happiness project on how to show affection to your cherubs. Too funny!

So to quote myself, here are some ways to show affection in your home:
1. Use kind words
2. Give hugs
3. Kiss family members
4. Spending time one on one
5. Wink
6. Smile
7. Hold hands
8. Give each other a massage
9. Sit closely together
10. Write love notes
11. Serve each other
12. Give small gifts

Some other great sites I found are:
40 ways to show your children love HERE
101 ways to show your children you love them HERE

Now for the fun part. Time to link up your Week 5. Write moments you have to share. This can be a new blog post or an older blog post. Anything that relates to how you have spent some time writing notes or using words to show love to your cherubs. I will leave the link open for the rest of the week incase you want to link up with us here. I hope that if you do decide to link up a post that you will take the time to read and comment on a few others to spread the blog love. If you are just finding out about this project you are most welcome to join in at any time. You do not have to start from week 1. I am so looking forward to reading what you have to share and thanks so much for joining in.