General Conference Spring 2011

I love General Conference. The Saturday session is always a little wild as we always (spring and fall) have soccer games on Saturday (thank goodness for Tivo). But the Sunday session is a regular holiday at our house. I LOVE it. It is so fun to hang out in our pjs and make good memories. I like that the boys were looking forward to it like they would any holiday. They should look forward to it right?
For breakfast we surprised the boys with this fun hot chocolate. Add a Peep and everything is more fun :)
Poor McKay struggled that day as he has EVERY day with teething. This molar has been a beast and it isn't even half way through.
We had French Toast (Josh's favorite) with orange syrup. Josh and I LOVED the orange syrup, they boys were slower to come around.
Then Palmer kept saying, "we'll go down stairs and then you can get our surprises ready." That boy is always so afraid I will forget things. So Josh took them downstairs and I got their surprises ready. We always try to make their snack healthy as we know that we are going to be in the house with them all day and we don't need them to be bouncing off the walls. We usually just do apples and Goldfish crackers. This year we gave them all a puzzle to put together along with their Conference packet. It was fun to do puzzles all day.
Okay so ya know what I just said about "healthy snacks"? Well, we canceled that out with this little activity. It was so fun, but holy mackerel they were hyper. I am going to do it again next conference, but maybe with ONE candy bowl. I got this idea at 8:30 the night before so it is a little thrown together, but you put 5 different words on 5 different bowls full of something (the idea used candy, but again, I will not do all candy again), when the kids hear the word, they get to get a piece out of the bowl. It really kept them listening and they were even shushing each other so they could hear. That was a change for sure.

The funniest thing happened when President Monson gave his talk about temples. He said "temple" over and over as well as "family". I know it is horrible, but couldn't stop laughing because it was a frenzy at the candy bowls. The boys ABSOLUTELY know what President Monson talked about. It was a really fun idea.
In between conferences when I was getting everything ready for dinner I heard all sorts of commotion from downstairs. I called Josh up to ask him to help me with something and this is what I saw (can you see his safety glasses under the Batman mask?) The kids were having a pretty good time with this crazy guy ;) They haven't stopped talking about it.

Josh built them each a "base" that they could have a little gun war from.
He even was thoughtful enough to get some pictures of the whole wild thing. I tell you what, there was a lot of laughing going on. Apparently Josh was the most hit target. Lincoln was laughing as he was telling me today when we were looking at these pictures "Dad got hit A LOT". I have a feeling that it explains some of Josh's nutty costume choice.


For dinner I tried a new recipe. I have never made sweet pork tacos, but have always wanted to. They turned out incredible (recipe coming soon :) and the left overs have been just as good. They were also easy peasy, which is always a plus.
For the next session our little booklet that we printed out from Sugardoodle had the funnest craft. The boys cut out all of the pieces and then when they heard the word on the piece during conference they would go and tape it to a balloon. This is what we had when conference was all done. They liked drawing the faces on too. I think this would be easy to do yourself as well. Paper plates would be perfect for this. We also snacked on this while listening to the inspiring talks.

After conference we talked to the boys about the "Armor of God" found in Ephesians and what each piece means. When I was young my mom made some amour for my brothers to wear. Definitely on my to do list.

For dessert I made these easy Peanut Butter Chocolate Eggs. I actually had all of the stuff for it right on hand.

The last thing we did was to make parachutes and raced them as well as tried some experiments with them. I am not posting this here, because I think it is already long enough. I will post them later, but they were really fun.

I have to say in years past Conference Sunday has just really been a long day for the kids as well as Josh and me. The boys fight when they are bored and the parents end up really grumpy. This year we were prepared with so many fun things to do that we loved the whole day.