Sunday, April 6, 2014

Conference Weekend

I absolutely love watching general conference! For those of you who don't know what that is here is a link for you. Essentially it is a two day event the first weekend in April and October where church leaders from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints speak. There are 5 sessions and each last two hours. Some people may think I'm crazy for loving this but I can't help it, I LOVE IT! I feel so uplifted and better about myself and who I am after listening to these talks. Its also an entire weekend that we as a family are home together, spending time together, and growing closer to our Savior Jesus Christ.
This year I wanted to have something special for the girls so that they could listen with us but still be entertained. Pinterest gave me the answer as usual, I found this idea and knew I had to do it. I didn't go out and buy a holder like she did, maybe for October I will. All I did was move our kitchen table into our living room (its not that big) and I laid out all the girls activities I had put together. Each activity or snack either had a picture of someone from the First Presidency, an Apostle, or a blank paper for one of the other speakers. Some of the activities I did I got from the links on that sight like the coloring pages and the apostle magnet pages. I also did brown bags for puppets, string and beads to make necklaces, and books. This idea was golden! It worked so well that we will be doing this every time we watch conference. The girls listened and made some comments about different talks and were for the most part quiet and happily did their activities or ate their snack. I was thrilled with how it turned out, also it wasn't very time consuming to put together. Printing stuff off took the longest and it wasn't like it was a hard thing to do. All together I think it took me an hour and a half/two hours to put everything together for two days and it was worth every minute.
 I also implemented "fun lunch" as my girls call it, I got the idea from this amazing gals blog. She is totally right, its such a simple thing to do that really doesn't take any extra time. Every time I use the toothpicks Savannah tells me how its such a great idea and whatever I've used the toothpicks with is usually the first things my girls eat.
 In between sessions Olivia and I made zucchini bread, she loved being my helper and getting to pour everything in since Savannah was playing some games on the computer. As a side note, don't you love Olivia's hair?! She refused to let me fix it this morning and said that a headband made it all better. She sure is the total opposite of her big sister and she sure does crack me up.
Overall it was a GREAT weekend! I'm sad its over actually and I'm already looking forward to October so we can do it all over again.