We are Mormon. This means every 6 months we have to think of new ways of getting our rowdy boys to at least pretend to pay attention to General Conference . For those of you who don't know, General conference is broadcasted from SLC and the leaders of our church give awesome talks on various subjects of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I remember longing for conference and I still look forward to it.... but lets be honest, we haven't really heard a complete conference address since our first baby was born nearly seven years ago. We try our best, but we have yet to find the thing that will allow us to listen, and our kids to get something out of it. I know there are parents out there that have it down. In fact, just this morning, I stopped by my friends house and her 10 year old proudly showed me the "conference folder" she made. It was labeled conference and was complete with tabs for her note taking. I was very impressed!! But let's just say we are not there yet. We land somewhere between color the pictures of the subjects as you hear them and conference bingo. Reverent? No! Get anything out of it? Doubt it! But we are trying...I mean really trying! I'm sure just today there was probably some amazing talk patting parents on the back for their efforts. It was no doubt inspiring and felt like a big spirit filled hug telling us we were on the right path. However if such talk was given we missed it. Especially since today we were not diligent in our conference "kid prep" and all of a sudden conference had started and we had no bingo pages or coloring pages printed out. Not wanting to interrupt conference to print something, we went with a new game. We had them listen for a word....every time they heard a word of mine or Daniel's choosing they'd get a skittle. We started with the words like "tithing," "Jesus Christ," "Church," and "Journal,." By the end we were letting it slide to forms of words, tithe, tithing, Lord, Savior, what have you. At one point Von pointed out the Book of Mormon was indeed a "journal" written by the prophets so we rewarded his deductive skills and a skittle was given. It was not quiet...but boy were they excited about the talks. Well except for the talk given by the sweet man from Zimbabwe. They could not understand a word he said. There were literally tears shed! "I can't understand what he is saying!!" "We don't know what his words mean!" "Why can't I understand him? I'm not going to get any skittles!!" This went on the entire talk....I did understand him but thanks to the weeping and wailing I could not, for the life of me, tell you what his talk was about!! Aside from this one hiccup my kids really were excited about the talks. They were even asking when the next conference starts!! A stranger coming across the scene may have labeled it inappropriate and too loud, I however am gonna mark it up as a success. One down 3 more to go!!
I have a cousin who diligently did family prayer and scripture study EVERY MORNING. As a college age girl I had the chance to stay at there house a couple weeks and see the whole thing play out first had. Morning after morning, before school, her husband would call all 8 kids up stairs. He loudly sang some sort of morning song "oh what a beautiful morning....." or "good morning, good morning..." as he played the piano,. He then called each child by name until one by one they all stumbled upstairs. It took them a while to come up and when they did half of them were still bundled up in their blankets still pretty much asleep. They'd wake up long enough to read their verses and then immediately go back to sleep. I remember her saying "they are sleeping under the spirit!" I thought of them today as we sat trying to hear what was going on. We caught maybe a third of what was being said between the, "They said JESUS," or, "I heard the word!" or "BINGO!" But at least we turned it on! And maybe, just maybe, our kids will get something from that.
For those of you who want to tune in and see what I missed you can catch it at
www.lds.org
