GC - 10/12 Edition

I haven't gone back to check, but I'm pretty sure I blog about General Conference just about every time it happens (twice a year, for any non-LDS folks reading this).  I think most of what we do to make the weekend fun for the kids stays the same each time, yet I feel the need to document it anyway.  After all, learning directly from a Prophet of God is a special opportunity.  And I intend to continue to try to make it a special experience for my family.

Making homemade donuts is still one of the things I look forward to about General Conference weekend.  Oh.  They are good.  Unfortunately, our oh-so-good recipe is an hours-long process, which makes the donuts a bit more of a challenge with conference beginning at 10am as it does here, rather than noon, as it did on the East coast.  But I get up a little earlier and start the dough in the bread maker and we do the best we can.  This time worked out just fine.  We also make crepes one morning, but I don't have any pictures of the crepes from this weekend, so you'll just have to take my word for it.

I laminated several more activity pages from The Friend Magazine, and the kids enjoyed working on them with dry erase markers.  We also laminated a few Conference BINGO cards I found online and awarded the kids with a Dum-Dum each time they got BINGO.

They were pretty excited about the lollipops, especially Eliza, and ended up getting frustrated about having to go through the process of getting BINGO in order to get a lollipop.  By the time we were watching the last session I think Ben and I were just letting them eat one whenever they wanted to, haha.

Eliza loved having free reign of the Sunday basket - where we stash the books and activities we use for Sacrament Meeting.

Cat was an attentive note-taker, at least for the first while.  She also insisted that we build a King Benjamin Tent.

I taped the pictures of the current General Authorities to the wall so that the kids could look at the pictures and names as another reference.

But the most original idea we implemented this year was to have the kids assemble a collage at the very end - I mean the last 20 or 30 minutes of the last session.  I pulled out a foam board I'd used on one side, all of our old Friend and Ensign magazines, some scissors, glue, and markers.  I asked the kids to make a collage of things they'd heard during General Conference.  Of course, Cat took over the project, but all of the kids were involved and enjoyed it.  And I was impressed with what they came up with.  It now hangs (by removable sticky strips) on the wall in our upstairs hallway.  I expect we'll add this to our traditions now.  It was a great way to get them through the hardest period of General Conference, yet encourage them to think about meaningful things and work together.

I'm so thankful to belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  I'm thankful for the priesthood and for a living prophet.  I feel the Holy Ghost witness to me that what he says is true, whenever I hear him speak.  And I feel better about my life when I follow his counsel.  I hope that my kids will grow up feeling the same way.