I LOVE General Conference!!

I don't think that I always loved it, not as a kid at least. It wasn't anything I dreaded, but going and sitting in the chapel for a couple of hours four times in a row wasn't my idea of a fun church meeting. The only thing I really enjoyed about it was watching the choir sing and listening to the church statistics during the Saturday afternoon session. But all that has changed!

Now I look forward to Conference weekend; and so do my kids! We now live in a place where it is broadcast on regular tv and instead of having to get into church dresses and sit on the uncomfortable pews, we can watch it in our jeans and t-shirts from our own front room. How wonderful is that?! And since we are at home, I can have all sorts of different activities going on with the kids to help them stay focused... not to mention that being home takes a major stresser off of me worrying about a noisy, fidgety toddler walking around.

We always have some fun ideas that we try out each conference time along with some tried and true things that we continue to do each time. This year I found a great way of keeping the kids from moving around from spot to spot for two hours and it worked wonderfully, so it will probably become one of those things that we start doing each time.

I quartered the room off, with a square in the middle for the snack tray, and each kid had their own section that they were to stay in. And it worked wonderfully! Emmy just sort of wandered around from square to square, but the other kids stayed where they were supposed to and paid attention to the talks while they worked on their booklets. They each had their conference baskets that had all the supplies they would need to entertain them for the session - scissors, glue, markers, a pencil, tape, a couple of hard candies, a drink for when the intermediate song came, and their conference booklet that has mazes, crossword puzzles, coloring pages, and all sorts of other pages of fun stuff that has to do with conference time, the first presidency and the 12 apostles, and other church things.In the past years, we have had the kids following along by finding who the speaker was from a set of pictures of the First Presidency and the Twelve and matching it to who was speaking, and this year I changed it up a little. I pre hung all the pictures on the wall and put a sticky note on the corner so we could tape subject squares up. When each person gets up, the kids listen to their talk and decide what the main idea of it is and then finds or makes a corresponding tab and puts it on the sticky note. Some times they agree on what they each think the main idea is, but it is interesting to see when they have different opinions about it.

I was missing a picture of Neil Anderson, so I tried to draw one from a picture I saw online, but Teagan said it looked funny - she said his nose was too big and his eyes scared her... but I thought it was fairly close, at least for someone who has lost their talent of drawing :-)

The kids always love having the snack tray down with them to munch on whenever they want. We usually put crackers and nuts and craisins or carrots and celery and such on it. Stuff I don't mind them grazing on for a couple of hours.

So during the sessions, the kids can munch, or listen, or take notes, or work on their conference booklets. As long as they are still and quiet, life is good. They have drawing paper if they just want to doodle and how to books they can look through. My only requirement for their books are that they finish 4 activities from it each session; if they do, then I have a little reward they get, but if they don't, then they miss out on the punch balloon or lollipop or whatever the prize is.

All our things worked so well this year with the kids and I am so happy about it! I was a little worried about doing conference by myself with having Daddy around, and with another kid in the house, but everything went perfectly. We didn't go for a drive between sessions like we usually do with Daddy, but we did walk down to the park and ran out some of their built up energy.

We'll see how tomorrow goes, if our good luck continues and the kids have another great conference day.(fingers crossed!) I love listening to conference, and when everything goes so smoothly like this, I get to hear so much more... one day I'll get back to the point where I can actually take notes, too, without having to worry about toddlers grabbing my pen or needing to grab a towel to clean up a spill. But for today I will go to sleep happy at how much I did hear!