Conference Weekend

I love General Conference weekend! It is so awesome to be able to listen to our church leaders, to hear what the Lord wants us to hear and to receive encouragement in our righteous efforts. 

While it is easy for grown-ups to be excited about conference, it is a little more challenging for kids. I am not sure if it is true for everyone, but sometimes we welcome church services because they are a break in the monotony of the weekend. So a Sunday at home becomes very looooong indeed, and it's much harder to keep the Sabbath day holy. I have found that if we do a few simple special Conference activities, it helps the boys (and Dave and I) remember that it is still Sunday, and helps encourage reverence and lengthens our attention spans. I am not the genius who came up with these ideas--I have found everything good from around the Internet and just tweaked them for what works best for our family. 

The first Conference activity we've tried to do is to go through our 72-hour-kits on Saturday. Since we are two hours ahead of Mountain Standard time, our conference sessions don't start until noon. That leaves us plenty of time to look at our 72 hour kits, to make sure the clothes still fit, the food hasn't expired, that we have enough of one thing or another. I am not going to lie--it's so easy to forget to do this. When we went through things this year, we found that the clothes we had put in there for Jed now fit Hank, and one bag of jerky had expired in 2011. So much for going through these every 6 months! However, now that we've gotten everything updated, it will be easy to maintain it every 6 months. I have also heard of families that rotate their food and have a "72-hour-kit feast" on Saturday afternoon while watching conference, and I think that sounds like lots of fun. We'll have to see how that works for us. 

                                                                                    

The next thing that works really well for us is our Conference topic sticker pages. Right now Dave and I select pictures that we represent topics that we think will be covered at conference; as the boys get older I would like to do a Family Home Evening activity where they help us choose the pictures/topics. Then before conference starts, I hang the pictures around the living room, with a blank sheet of paper next to each one. Each time they hear the word represented by the pictures (Savior or Jesus Christ for the picture above), they point it out and they get to put a sticker on the paper. We love to see which topic is covered the most by the end of all the sessions, and the boys love the little treat they get after 5 stickers show up on a topic's page.                                                                         

 We also have plenty of silliness, especially during the song breaks. We don't require listening to every talk but we do think it's important to listen to everything President Monson says, and we love to sustain our leaders in the Saturday afternoon session.

 I tried to get Hank to be my "little baby" and snuggle with me, since I am feeling baby hungry after seeing my sister Hanna's tiny boy SJ over Skype (he was born on April 2nd. Yay for my dear sister, awesome BIL Stephen and of course, SJ!). Hank loved it for a minute and then decided he is not a little baby and wasn't going to be treated like one.

 Jed was making us practice our disgusted faces, but then he switched his at the last second. 

 Hank sat in the little tub and showed off his belly button.

As you can see, the stickers are a major favorite in this house! Here Hank is being excited about seeing President Monson close the conference for another 6 months. I am so glad we can watch Conference in our home and feel the Spirit, and that our boys can feel it too.