I recently celebrated my wedding anniversary! Yay!!! 35 years! See the times I’ve blogged about past years’ celebrations here and here.

I call our anniversary our family’s birthday. To celebrate it, one of things I love to do is a family zoom meeting involving all my children even if they live out of state, or out of the country. Currently one of them lives in Ireland with his wife. It’s tricky to get everyone’s schedule to mesh what with them in Ireland and another son in Texas with his wife.

With those factors, we got most everyone together recently. During that celebration, we played a simple game to get to know each other better. That’s my favorite type of game.

To play the game I shared this page over here from familysearch.org called the “52 Stories, 52 Questions” feature with everyone in the family via text. Then I asked people to pick one of those questions and then answer it by texting me the question and their answer to it.

Here are the questions below:

Next I asked everyone to get some paper and pencil to take notes, or take notes on a phone, so they could keep track of all the questions and answers.

Then I read off the questions and the answers without revealing who picked that question and answer.

Then I asked them to match up who said what answer with what question.

Then I read each question again one by one and revealed the answers.

We all had a great time! Among other things, here are the fun interesting facts I learned about some of my family members:

-my younger daughter remembers having a collection of rocks when she was a child

-my older daughter wants to travel to Europe to see Rome, Paris, London and Venice.

-Son #1 has lived in 14 places not including the 9 places during his mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and 2 places he doesn’t remember before he was 2.

-The most exotic food my husband has eaten is cow tongue and turtle egg soup, from Mexico, when he was a foreign exchange student.

-Son #5 and youngest child remembers these as family traditions: me playing the piano to wake the family up in the morning, being bribed to stay wearing church clothes all day in order to have dessert on Sunday evening, alternating who says family prayer by going through birth order, having a Bethlehem supper for Christmas, using the Angel Moroni on the top of our Christmas tree instead of a star, reading Luke 2 on Christmas Eve, and singing along my piano playing of Christmas carols and hymns as we act out Luke 2.

I hope you will find this simple game with questions useful and fun in strengthening connections in your family! The best part is that you can play this game via videochat with people who live far away.

Want some tips for creating a lasting marriage?

Go here to see my girlfriend Joyce’s tips.

Go here to see my tips for a strong marriage, which I wrote after 30 years of marriage.