Communication and mutual problem solving

Communication is seriously the best way to problem solve any sort of problem! Period.

On Thursday we went over the counsel method--I found it really interesting and helpful. And so, that is what will be discussed on this post.

The counsel method includes the following. We compared it to the way that the first presidency themselves counsel together once a week to solve any problems.

• participants all reach a consensus and everybody is n agreement
• regarding God's will
• a clear structure is used
• structured way of who goes first
• intended for families
• no interruptions, speak one at a time
• learn to live the higher law
• everybody has the opportunity to speak
• planning to plan on a daily basis

I really liked this comparison because it is just so effective in getting things done and problems solved! If a family has a daily meeting per say, like FHE for example, they not only have the chance to grow together through constant interaction, but also any problems or concerns can be addressed. 

I really like this idea of having daily meetings as a family. I remember I did a similar thing with my family, but it never worked out because no one ever really paid attention and everybody wasn't really allowed to speak at a time because everyone seemed to talk at the same time.  A structured meeting day and time with chairs and notes and whatnot is not necessary, something as simple as taking a weekly trip to the park can serve and accomplish this purpose as well. 

Stress!

This post is a week overdue, ooops. Let's get to it though!

The week started of with a discussion of family stresses. These would include financial stresses, addiction in the family, disability, accidents, death, etc. In the reading that we did there was a particular stressor that made me think a lot about the role that it played in my family life and how impacting it has been.
Addiction.

Alcohol has been one of the biggest stressors in my family aside from all those other stressors that present themselves in the family.It seriously consumes an individual and turns them so dependent of that nasty stuff. Rather than seeking out help from the family, an alcoholic will only turn to alcohol as a means of comfort. AS if alcohol could provide the counsel and love that family does!
Another addiction that consumed my family is pornography. It seriously is, wow, I can't even describe it for what it is. It is so damaging to not only the individual who consumes it, but also the family Like with alcohol, it is turned to when things get tough. It brings comfort. Seriously, as if! It is like a gateway drug--then you venture out and do even more damaging things!

Aside from these main big stressors that were preset in my family-- it was our faith in the Lord and my mom's steadfastness to remain in the church despite my dad's persecution that allowed us to in a way develop a force shield of protection against them so that they wouldn't infect us as well.
That's what's so great about the Gospel-- it allows for resilience against stress for individuals according to their faith.

In my future family, I'm sure that stressors will present themselves-- I just hope that addictions isn't one of them!

As I've thought about it, stress can be compared to that diamond analogy-- the right amount of pressure will produce a diamond. The right amount and kind of stress will perfect a family and shape them. Remember that the Lord doesn't give you struggles that you can't handle-- every stress in your life is meant to shape you into the kind of person that the Lord wants you to be.

Let's talk about sex, baby

Ahahahaha, yes, I did just use that title for my entry this week.
The following post totally justifies it though!

This week we talked talking about sexual intimacy in class. At first it was a little awkward because just talking about it makes me uneasy, but as the week went on I eased up a bit. It also helped that we were covering the same topic, more specifically the law of chastity in my family relations class. I really love how this semester all my classes seem to correlate with each other.

Thursday during he discussion we talked about ways to communicate this sensitive topic to our kids when the time came for them to learn about the famous birds and the bees and how to communicate it to them. Throughout the discussion, I really got to thinking-- if I am so freaked out sometimes talking about sex, how am I going to talk to my future kids about this so that they learn early on that sex is a beautiful thing rather than what their peers may be telling them-- a dirty thing? There was a comment made in class about starting off sex education for our children at a young age. Of course, not going into full detail, but just starting off small and gradually building on the information that you give them. I totally agree with this statement 100%. I don't know where I read or heard it, but specialists recommend that as early as age 3 parents should start this process by answering their questions. Of course, a 3-5 year old won't e asking questions that a typical 16 year old might ask about sex, but rather questions that have to do with their bodies. 3-5 year olds are in the toddler stage, where they begin to start questioning their environments. From this the question of what makes girls and boys different may arise. Simple, explain to them these differences, don't sugar coat anything, tell it how it is! Tell them the importance of the body and how certain parts are more special than others and should be covered up. From there as they grow up, answer the questions that start to come from your child-- of course as deemed appropriate to their levels of understanding.

So why is talking to your kids about sex important? Well, look at the picture above. Kids 12-17 are the LARGEST group to be viewing pornographic material. That's crazy! Pornography is SUCH a destructive thing-- it destroys not only family relationships, but the ability for you to be with the Spirit. The Spirit runs away frightened when this happens. It is better to teach a child about the dangers viewing porn poses rather than they finding out themselves from first hand experience later on. The way I see it, pornography is like a gateway drug to other dangerous, immoral behavior that can lead to teen pregnancy or even STDs.

One very important thing though-- be sure that YOU are the ones (you and your spouse) that teach your children about sexuality. Not doing so and avoiding the topic can cause your questioning child to go out and seek other sources to give them this information that you refuse to give to them. Why get information from a secondary source than a primary source such as parents-- who actually know the symbolism and importance of it because they've actually been through it first hand. You know what the Proclamation says-- that parents are the ones responsible for the upbringing of their children and I honestly think that educating children about sex is part of that upbringing.

I guess it's time that I start to get over this awkwardneess about sex, huh?
For the sake of my future children and when that time does come to tell them how it really is.

A little something extra

I seriously love music and try to incorporate it into anything. Lately I've been in love with Latin music- especially with music that talks of love and all that butterfly in your stomach stuff.
Especially since starting to talk about what goes on in marriage...I've found myself listening to these songs more often than usual and thought I'd share a song that for me depicts everything that I want in my future marriage and with the bond with my future husband.

One song that describes the amazingness of marriage and falling in love is this song by Camila, a Mexican group. This song is in Spanish, so I'll summarize it for those that don't understand Spanish. The song is titled "Everything Changed". Basically the song talks about the process of falling in love and how that love has changed everything in you.

I'm going to be totally honest here, but I want to marry a guy that has a love for music such as this. Not specifically Spanish ones, that would be great too, but just music that is beautiful and delivers messages you an learn from and apply to your life. From this song, I've learned that love changes you-- and this is true! Seriously though, it's just the fact that I listen to these types of songs that sometimes I feel like I'm part of that song and living the words that the artist sings about. I don't know if that makes sense.

Here's another song that just makes me gush over the fact that Latin music is just so romantic and insightful.The title of this song is "This Absence" by David Bisbal- an artist from Spain. He sings about how he feels being alone without his love and how her absence is having such a toll on him. This song reminds me of the scripture about how man completes woman and vice versa. We all have that desire to be part of someone-- without a partner and being married to them  and under the right authority, we are not yet complete without them. This song reminds me of the huge influence that love has. It can be negative, causing feelings of incompleteness and longing for that love that only a wife or husband can provide, or positive-- causing feels of joy that no other union can provide.

So yeah, that was a little something.
Not gonna lie, if I'm fortunate enough to meet and end up with a guy that listens to these types of songs and music, you have no idea how happy that will make me.
That's another thing that attracts me to a guy-- their music taste. Can they learn positive things from the music they listen to? Does it make them strive to be a better person?

Early Marriage Adjustments

In class on Tuesday we talked about conflicts that ca arise in the early marriage stage and the many adjustments that are made at that stage. There was an instance where we talked about things that can be done as early as the engagement period to avoid conflict in early marriage. In my marriage class we learned about 2 kinds of conflict that present themselves in a marriage no matter what stage that marriage is in. These were perpetual and solvable problems. Solvable problems include issues on money, dealing with stress, household chores, sex, parenthood, and in laws. Perpetual problems are those types of issues that no matter how many times you may argue about, they never are solved.

I think that early on, before marriage, it is important to communicate about what you want. For example if you really care about tidiness and are worried that perhaps your spouse will have trouble with that-- talk about it! Solvable problems are easily solved when you talk about them. It will be far more easier to adjust to marriage life if you discuss with your significant other how you will deal with potential problems that you anticipate will appear early on in your marriage. If you solve those problems early on, there will be less conflict between the both of you as time progresses.

Something that I thought about as married students in the class shared what they had to adjust to when the first married, I thought specifically about the issue of sharing a bed. Don't get me wrong, I love to cuddle and sleep in someone's arms, but to do that for 7+ hours? I love sleeping and if there is someone next to me perhaps snoring or kicking-- I will kick you out. That's another thing I sometimes worry about when I do in fact get married-- what if my future husband snores? The sound of snoring is absolutely so beyond annoying to me. How on Earth will I adjust to that if my spouse snores? I guess we will have to see!

I bet Heavenly Father will make it that the guy I marry snore just to test my patience. Ah man, that would be hilarious, but let's hope not.

Love

Oh Queen, how amazing you are. And Freddy Mercury....oh boy can that man sing or what?

In class we just finished talking about love. Falling in love, choosing a lie partner, etc. At the end of class each day I just thought to myself, especially after the discussing on falling in love, "I've never been in love before!" I've had previous relationships before and seriously pondered at what point in these relationships, I had indeed fallen "in love"with these guys. I layer realized that in a majority of these relationships, I only said the "L"word when I felt a need to have the relationship reach a deeper level. I felt like saying those three words meant that we were completely settled on each other...until of course when we decided to break it off.

This whole discussion on love in general was kinda hard to sit through because my own personal views on the matter are skewed. I don't really know what it really is, well I do in a way, but I feel like the main examples in my life who were supposed to help me in defining this word, messed up my understanding of what it means to love someone-- my parents.
I think that to be in love with someone-- it means different things to different people. At this point in my life I'm still trying to figure this out. At times when I think back to specific guys I've been in relations with, I think "yeah, I've been in love with him" and other times I'm like "No." After discussing this topic n class, I feel ready to really start figuring out what love means again. This topic has really made me think about also reasons why a specific past relationship failed and perhaps can one day revive if the circumstances are acceptable.I really discovered how important it really is to have shared values, backgrounds, and experiences when you're with someone and how those similarities are what makes you a good match with that person. I learned to reject the belief that "opposites attract". Now that I think about it, half of my past relationships were "opposite"-- there we go to why they failed!

And because I just really love Queen, here's a little something else.

Gender Roles and Gender

 "In a talk titled, "Differences Inherent Between Men and Women", I really liked what Elder Bateman said about seeing men and women as the glorious individuals they really are. Growing up I always had this negative view of a man solely because of those men in my life growing up who weren't the best examples. After becoming familiar with the Gospel and having a better understanding of our purpose here on Earth, my view of men has changed. Sure there are men that aren't necessarily the best, but it is so important to encourage them daily to be the best they can be so that one day when they have families and wives-- they can assume the roles of husband and father they were born to take. By helping them be righteous, we create the type of men we want in our lives as well as the type of men they were born to be.  This goes both ways-- for men and women."

This is an excerpt from an assignment I had to do in my family foundations class about a reading on gender roles.I seriously just loved it because it's totally true, we should all encourage each other to become the people capable of assuming the divine roles of spouses and parents. Growing up, I always was a "Yeah women's rights! Equality!" type of person and believed that we were all equal and especially as parents should assume shared responsibility in taking care if the family and home. I hated whenever someone said, "Go to the kitchen, you belong there!". Now that I think of it, these stereotypes are true to some extent. Women are supposed to be those that take care of the home and their children because that's their main duty. The thing is that some people overlook that part of the Proclamation where it says that both man and wife need to SHARE these responsibilities and be equal. 

In one of the preparation videos that we were supposed to watch, someone said that instead of focusing in making women and men equal, we should instead focus on offering OPPORTUNITIES instead of trying to force everyone to be equal. 

It's true! 

To conclude, I just think it all comes down to agency and your own personal beliefs on the matter of gender. For me, I center all my personal beliefs around the Gospel. For me the Gospel offers answers to question like this one concerning roles, same gender attraction, and gender.

Culture and Immigration

Thursday's class was like WHOA. We did a role play of the typical family that immigrated to the United States and what difficulties they all went through.  Throughout the entire class I was like "dude, this is my life". Why? Well, my family went through the same situation to get to the point that they are today as well as to the point where my siblings and I are as well. I couldn't write my entire story, but nah. It would be too long to tell you all how horrible the whole experience was for me-- especially during those years when I was left in Ecuador with my brother and taken care of our grandparents while both of my parents worked in the States.

What I can tell you though, I also shared in class on Thursday. My relief in a way, that I was fortunate enough to come to the US at the age I did. Being young and coming to this country, it wasn't difficult adapting to this new way of life. I picked up the language within a year and settled into this new country that now I truly consider my home. I'm glad I wasn't like that teenager in the role-play.

Then I got to thinking about how much this new culture that my family came into changed our family. Especially for my dad. He let himself allow this new culture and traditions "swallow" him up and cause him to abandon the very little traditions and culture that he brought from Ecuador. He became so engulfed in becoming a "gringo", that he became ashamed of his own roots. Like I mentioned earlier-- my entire story is so long that I think I might even write a book about my life someday. Maybe even loo into having it made in a soap opera or movie-- but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. I went home that afternoon and shared this experience with my mom. She was blown away! I expressed to her the gratitude I had of her sacrifice as well as my dad's to come to this country and eventually bringing us here.

I see now what the Lord means when he says that he gives us our trials to help us grow. From all the trials that immigrating to this country has brought - I have really learned to learn from each of them and to apply them in my own education by sharing my experiences and seeing how a majority of them correlate with all that I'm learning throughout my college career.

I can honestly say that I'm blessed for having had these trials because of all the knowledge they have brought me.

Oooops

Totally forgot to write a post on last week's class, sorry!

Last week we talked about the family systems theory and what genograms can tell us about our family relationships and patterns we can find from them. Following the preparation assignments that Bro. Williams put up for us to do, among them was to start thinking about what types of relationships we have with our family members. Mine was fairly easy because of the distance that me and my siblings have from my dad-- a solid brick wall of communication. For the relationships with my siblings and my mom our levels of communication and our overall relationship is content and open-- a dashed line.

Then I made a very interesting observation while attempting to draw my entire family genogram; something that I kinda knew all along in my heart, but kinda refused to believe. I figured out that entirely on my dad's side of the family are full of divorce, infidelity, children out of wedlock, even crime in some cases. Talk about a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah in my own family- but then again who am I to judge, right? Then on my mom's side are marriages that have lasted until death and basically the opposite of the other side. It makes me wonder if both of their social classes affected the way that they both turned out and eventually raised both of my parents?

Of course, looking back at the things that both family sides have gone through, I can certainly learn from them. Especially not to do most of the things that they did that resulted in families being separated and children growing up as emotional messes and following in their parent's footsteps; like some of my scandalous cousins. Again, I'm no one to judge them. They are my family after all and for some reason the Lord put them in my life-- to learn from their mistakes so that I raise my own family in a much better privileged way.

Seriously though, I cannot express the words of gratitude I have for this class. I'm learning so much about not only myself, but my own family.

The New Economic Reality Documentary

When I saw that we were required to watch this documentary for our preparation for class on Thursday I was like "WOO-HOO!" I love watching documentaries, it's actually one of my favorite things to do, especially if it has to do with a topic of my personal interest. Of course, this documentary fit in that category because I love learning about families and anything pertaining to them.

Something that really caused me a great impression was the fact that some countries actually PAY couples to have children. Wow, dumb. If the government is paying their people to have kids, it's a bad move because children would be born for the wrong reasons. I honestly think that children should be brought into the world to parents that want them more than anything else in the world. These poor kids that are being born into families that are doing it for the money-- I seriously think that they are at a greater risk for abuse. Once the couple gets their sum for having the child, then what? If the couple was actually doing it for the concept to have a child and have the money to help raise it because they were unable and not for selfish reasons, then of course the child wouldn't be at risk for abuse. Whereas on the other hand if the couple only wanted the money and gave birth to the child for personal gain, well, I feel really sorry for that child.
I think that before deciding to start having children, you should really think about it, of course with your spouse too. Are you capable of giving your child the love and attention they need? If a couple were to have a child for the money, I doubt that a majority of them did not ponder this question therefore putting the child in an environment where they aren't treated with the love they need and only treated as "the kid that got us the new car, house, etc." and not as the product of the love that the wife and husband have for each other. It's really sad because that's what a child should be seen and treated as- the product of two people who love each other and are willing to go under all sacrifice necessary to have the product of that pure love they both have for each other in their lives.

Imagine this conversation for example:

Kid: Mommy, why did you and daddy decide to have me?
Mom: For a new Lexus. 

How awkward would that be? Imagine how the poor child would feel?

Overall, this documentary was really quite...sad. It was sad because it came to show just how much the family is being disintegrated throughout the world. 

In the Proclamation it states that the disintegration of the family would bring great calamities. When President Gordon B. Hinckley was prophet, during a conference session, he talked about how the adversary is working so hard to destroy families in these latter- days because the family is one of the greatest gifts that the Lord is able to give us. The family is so sacred and so important for us being able to achieve eternal life. With the disintegration of it through the rise of cohabitation, fertility rates dropping, and all these different trends-- we are letting Satan win this battle. The calamities that were predicted by the proclamation are actually coming to pass because of this disintegration. We see on the news daily about tragedies (like the recent Boston bombing) and rumors of war (North Korea, I'm talking to you). Why are we letting this happen? Seriously, stop.

I pray each day that the Lord helps me prepare to have and maintain a family that will be so strong and tied together with the love and faith that we have for each other and Christ so that the adversary can't touch us and break us apart. My own family now has been severely affected by worldly things that it has disintegrated dramatically. There is no way that I will ever let this occur to my future family, ever.

Hello!

For my Family Relations class we have to keep a blog and I want to integrate it with this, my personal blog. I already really love this class and am so excited to start learning on my favorite topic- THE FAMILY! I will be making daily posts on here about what I've been learning and discussing in class and any insights I've had as well as my daily stuff- my everyday thoughts, realizations, etc. For my fellow classmates feel free to look around my blog-- I have over a year's worth of blog posts! I'm really looking forward to getting to know all of you through reading what you post on your own blogs. I enjoy writing and love it! On this blog I've poured my heart and soul and I've written my experiences in the hopes that people read and learn from those experiences they've read. I am so excited about this blog and especially about this class, oh my goodness! I want and hope that this class helps me learn skills to help me raise a family someday. Raise my family in a manner I wasn't fortunate enough to be raised in-- especially in a home that is centered around the Gospel.

Michela!

Me and my mom

I'm Jessica, but I go by Jess. I'm from Bedford Hills, New York (doesn't it sound so fancy?). Also, I'm not originally from here. I'm 100% Ecuadorian. I was born in Cuenca, Ecuador and moved here to the states when I was 6. My parents wanted a better life for me and my brother and decided to move here. Thanks to them I am able to study here and be the first member of my family to be attending college! This is my 4th semester here and I seriously love it here as each year passes. I'm a child development major with a minor in family and marriage studies. I honestly don't know what I'm going to do with my degree yet, but whatever life throws at me after I graduate, I'll take it. I'm the oldest in my family. I have a younger brother, Adrian. He's 18 and is currently on a mission in Carlsbad, California. My younger sister Stephanie is 11 and in the 6th grade. I also have an adorable cat and dog-- Michela and Josie; I treat them as my children and they seriously bring me so much happiness into my life! In my free time I love working out, listening to music, cooking, and blogging.

Me and my little sister Stephanie

My brother Adrian (black hair). Isn't he handsome? :)

My dog Josie

My sister, my brother, and my mom plus my two pets make up my family! :)

Something I found on Pinterest that I really liked and thought I'd share :)