Wow! What a week!

As we take a quick look back over this weeks blog activities, we are so blessed by the response from you all! Thanks so much for your support!

Our week started on Sunday, with a wonderful time of worship, followed by having a houseful of students and friends to watch Super Bowl 50. On Monday, Amy and Jay, traveled to Somerset, PA so Amy could speak to the sweet group of moms who attend the St. Paul's M.O.P.S. group. We then shared her message as a 3 part mini-series on Tuesday through Thursday! The response from Amy's posts was terrific! We so appreciate all of you who took the time to read and share encouraging comments!

If you missed any of the four post for this week, simply click on the graphic below.

Along with Amy's mini-series, we shared some resources that we love and recommend. Here are all 6 books, available via Amazon.com! Just click on the book cover that interests you!

We are so excited to share with you a little Valentine's project! Not too long ago, Amy and I wanted to do something that brought a spark into our marriage. We wanted to do something that would push us spiritually, emotionally, and physically. We want to be closer to each other, and closer to God. So we committed to 8 Days of Intimacy! Next week we will share more about our experience and what the 8 day challenge looks like. So be sure to join us starting this Sunday, February 14th, YES, Valentine's Day, to try something new and exciting! Take the 8 Day's of Intimacy challenge!

Thanks for being with us today! Please LIKE, Comment, and share us with your family and friends!

Have a great weekend!

- the higham family

Hi we're Jay & Amy, and we've been married for 19 years and are super blessed to be busy raising our 5 kids; 4 boys and 1 girl! We juggle the adventures of life and ministry and share what we are learning as it relates to marriage, family, raising kids, serving in the church, and chasing after Jesus. Raising a family is hard work, especially in today's culture. But our hope is to encourage you and your family, as we live for the glory of God.

This post includes Affiliate Links. While we have received no compensation in recommending the titles within this blog post, we will receive a percentage of sales when you order the recommended resources. This comes to us at no extra charge to you. Thanks to our affiliation with Amazon.com, we are able to offer these resources at great low prices with quick dependable service. If you have any further concerns, please see our disclosure page. Thank you for helping to support TheHighamFamily.com.

So last night, we gather, like millions of Americans, to watch Super Bowl 50. It was a celebration of football at it highest caliber. We watched as the Denver Broncos, with quarterback Peyton Manning, took on the Carolina Panther, with quarterback Cam Newton. It was suppose to be a great battle, quarterback on quarterback, a crushing defense vs an fast paced, high-scoring offense. Well, I'm not sure it was the game of the century, but it came to an end with the Bronco on top, and now the new Super Bowl 50 Champions.

Today, as I think back over the last 24 hours, I'm noticing a few things about our Super Bowl habits and how watching the game as a family makes for some great memories. But more than creating memories, what can we teach our kids when the big game day rolls around.

1. We are a family who like to entertain.
- No, we're not clowns looking for an opportunity to perform before a captured audience. I mean, we like to entertain guest in our home. In other words, we love to exercise the gift of hospitality! And we always have. Even as a newly wedded couple, Amy and I have loved the opportunity to open up the doors of our home and lives to family and friends. Last night was just another wonderful opportunity to do that. We invited and welcomed a handful of students and the director of music and worship and his wife into the house for the game. It wasn't a large gathering. Nor was it a fancy gathering. We simply set out some of our favorite football foods and watched the game. No agenda. No planning needed. Just a football game and friends.

Why? Well, aside from loving to host gatherings like this, we want to teach our kids what it looks like to love and serve others. I think the sense of entitlement, or the "this is what I expect and what I deserve" mentality that many students and young adults exhibit, is eroding our idea of putting others first. When we make life all about ourselves, it creates for our kids a trap of prideful arrogance. But when we live to serve someone else, we practice the very things that Jesus lived and taught. This allows us to create in our kids a desire to want to serve others. We find great joy in knowing that we have been able to welcome someone into our home and make them as comfortable and as valued as possible. We want our children to experience  that same joy, and thus live to serve others.

2. We are a family who thrives on relationships.
- We were not wired to be alone. This from the guy who is painful introverted and quite comfortable being alone. But even as an introvert, I need relationships. As a family, we need to be more than just the tightly weaved community that we are raising. We need the relationships of those around us; friends and co-workers and students from our ministry.

Last night we set up to game watching locations; one in our living room on the first floor, and the other in our family room on the lower level. Our guests had the freedom to choose where they wanted to sit and watch. And they were free to come and go as they pleased. What that created was an opportunity for all of our guests, but especially our kids, to mix and mingle. They were able to hang out with their friends and have fun. But they were also blessed with the opportunity to mingle and talk with other adults.

For us, relationships are extremely important. Amy and I still talk about our dear "small group" friends that we shared a season with while in Somerset. That time with them proved to be a season of growth and encouragement for our family. We found real friends, who cared deeply for Amy and I, and our family. And to this day, we look forward to seeing them and spending time with them. We want our kids to know those same, tender relationships. So being able to welcome both students and adults into our home and creating the opportunity for both to build relationships is pretty sweet.

3. These are great family moments.
- The older our kids get, the more cherished and valuable our time with them becomes. Over the last couple of years, Amy and I have really worked hard to create more moments for memories. Whether it's in a trip, a special outing, a dinner, or just sitting around the table playing a board games, we want to create moments for memories.

This idea stems for a conversation we had a couple of years back. We wondered what our kids would talk about when they were in the 40's and 50's? Would they be able to look back and laugh at the goofy things we've done? Would they remember special birthdays or moments from the past with great fondness and tears? Till that point, we weren't sure we were creating life-long memories. So we committed to being better at creating family memories that we would one day laugh about.

Now this isn't about developing scripted activities that turn in to 30 minute sitcom-like programs that we could re-run sometime in the future. We just simply felt that we needed to be a little more proactive in doing things as a family. Honestly, just sitting around the dinner table with all 5 kids in attendance can lead to tear-filled eyes and gut wrenching  belly laughs. But taking something like a sporting event and creating an opportunity where we can sit down as a family with friends, have a few good laughs, and eat some delicious food is something that we just can't pass up.

Our hopes in the years to come isn't that they remember Super Bowl 50, or who won, or the final score, or the half-time show, or even the commercials. Our hope is that some day we'll be sitting around a holiday meal table, and someone all of a sudden brings up, "Hey, do you remember the night when..." followed by uncontrollable laughter. I hope we are teaching our kids the important gifts of hospitality, deep relationships, and time well spent.

- the higham family

So earlier this week Amy and I sat down for an official business meeting to talk about what we want to do with the blog going forward. We decided that if we're going to really do this, then we needed a plan.

Our passion of for the family, and encouraging other families to seek God and grow together in His love and grace. We care about our relationship as husband and wife, and try really hard to honor each in our roles. We love our kids and do our best to parent them from a biblical perspective. As a family, we fight to keep a heathy balance church, school, sports, careers, ministry, and issues with culture. And we do all of this in the hopes of bringing glory to our Father in heaven!

At our meeting we began to brainstorm for ideas of how we can share all the things that God is teaching us with other families. We want to write about things build up families and encourage the to chase after God. We want to share our stories, the good stuff and the bad stuff. We want to share our successes and our failures, our joys and our fears. So we are committing to pray for each other, the blog and those who will read the blog; asking that God will lead our hearts to topics that are helpful, encouraging, and worthy of someone taking the time to read, comment, and share. 

We picked up a great resource towards the end of last summer. A book written by a friend of ours who shared her blogging story to encourage other to do the same. She started her blog as a personal hobby, but God has taken her hobby and turned it into her career. Her book is helping us to realize this new dream of ours. So in the coming weeks, you should start to see some significant changes to the blog.

1. New Content & Regular Posts...
- Starting later this month, Amy and I will be sharing new content; posts for husbands and wives, moms and dads. We will be sharing some of the things we have learned over the years (and even some of the things were still learning) as being a wive and a husband. We hope to share some of the lessons, experiences, and goals we have for our family. And we plan on doing this on a daily basis. That's right, a new blog post every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and on some Saturdays. Sunday's we plan on keeping as our Sabbath Day of Rest.

2. A Ministry & A Business...
- One of our major goals for the blog is that it become a true blessing to families. So we see this opportunity as a ministry. But, like many other ministries, there are expenses that come with maintaining a blog. And so, other goal we have is to grow the blog as a source of income for our family. While the content that we create and post will be free to all readers, we do plan on using more affiliate links, product sales (family t-shirts, future book sales, and other items), various advertisements, and sponsored blog posts. What we don't want to do is turn the blog into one constant commercial, however, we do want to use it as a platform for future projects and possibilities. So you should know that when you click on a link or purchase a product that we recommend using a link we provide, we may receive a small percentage of your order as income. Don't worry though, this doesn't come at any additional cost to you. You should also know that when you order one of Jay's books or a family t-shirt, those items go directly to support us and the blog.

3. Speaking Engagements...
- A third goal that we are praying about is the opportunity of speaking engagements, particularly for Jay, but also for Amy. As much as we love writing about what God is doing in our family, we love talking about it as well. So we have started to seriously pray about launching a speaking ministry; visiting various groups to talk about marriage, family, and culture, all from a biblical platform. So if you are a leader of a small group, M.O.P.S. group, men's ministry, family ministry, church, or faith-based organization, be on the look out for more information coming later this year.

So, while we may not have posted anything in the last couple of day, we have spent a lot of time thinking and planning for the blog! In just a couple of days, we will be posting a number of great topics that we think you might find helpful, including a special series that we're calling, 8 Days to Intimacy, that will post over the Valentine's week.

Lastly, we want to say thank you, again, to everyone who has encouraged us to continue with the blog! Your prayers, support, and loving words have really helped us to see the possibilities that are out there. We really do appreciate that you read what we share!

Be watching, the new content rolls out in just a couple of days!

- jay & amy higham

​This weekend we said, Happy birthday to Aiden, as he steps into adolescence. Welcome to Life in the Higham House, the Weekend Edition! Come along with us as we celebrate Aiden with a visit to Dave and Busters, take a drive through the city, and enjoy some ice cream cake.

​Check the weekend vlog!

Thanks for watching!

Be sure to join us next Monday, for another weekend edition of, Life in the Higham House!

- higham family

Hi we're Jay & Amy, and we've been married for 19 years and are super blessed to be busy raising our 5 kids; 4 boys and 1 girl! We juggle the adventures of life and ministry and share what we are learning as it relates to marriage, family, raising kids, serving in the church, and chasing after Jesus. Raising a family is hard work, especially in today's culture. But our hope is to encourage you and your family, as we live for the glory of God.