General Conference Activities

Last October, I decided to make watching LDS General Conference more fun for the whole family.

This year, I decided instead of having a bag with a general authority in it, it would be easier to just look through the cards, and I could have a schedule of things to do.  That way, I could make sure that any sweets would be consumed only after lunch and things with similar types of messes could be done back-to-back.  I didn't take many pictures this year... it's a bit trickier to do with baby in-tow. :)

Special breakfast: Blueberry waffles

Saturday Morning Session

-Coloring

-Foam Sticker pictures (I got some half off at Target, leftover from Easter)

-Pin hole picture- draw a simple line drawing (or print one) and with the paper on carpet, use a pin to poke holes along the line.  Then hang it up on a window with the drawing side to the window (so all you can see are the holes) and you can see the pictures with light!  The Frog did a spaceship with an alien inside :)

-Build a temple out of Legos

-Making Play Dough & playing with it.  (this lasted a long time)

Saturday Afternoon Session

The kids were napping for the first part of it

-Toothpick and marshmallow sculptures- The Frog loved this, and would have spent even more time on it than he did, but I sadly ran out of toothpicks.  I'll be better prepared next time

-Painted finger and toenails

Special Breakfast: Cinnamon Rolls

Sunday Morning Session

-Snack (took longer than I expected)

-noodle necklaces- I started out with macaroni, but quickly realized they were waaay too small to thread.  If I had the bigger ones, it would have worked, so we ended up using a penne instead.  I was going to have them color them with marker, but quickly discovered that was way too messy as well..  Fruit loops might be a better alternative next time- that way we could sort them into colors first, and it's a special treat I would not normally let them have.

-water coloring.  I was going to have them draw something on the back that we would cut out after water coloring, but I had to put Hazel down for a nap and couldn't supervise.  As a result, they quickly grew bored of this.

Sunday Afternoon Session

-Roll and cut out sugar cookie dough- it was cute to have The Frog pick out a cookie cutter and say why it reminded him of Jesus.  ("We should do a hand because Jesus had holes in his hands".  "Jesus was an angel after he died, right?"  "Jesus loves everyone, so we should do hearts"....)

-"Paint" the cookies with egg yolk + 1 drop food coloring.  We just had green, yellow and orange.  A fun, less sugary, frosting substitue.

-scissors and punches- I have a lot of interesting scissors and punches they like to play with.  I thought after they cut things out, we could try to make shape collages, or make Easter Eggs like this or this, but Peach accidentally dropped one of the huge punches on The Frog's foot and he was basically freaking out and crying for the rest of conference.  We didn't make him take a nap and ended up getting him to fall asleep during the last 15 minutes.  Looks like he needed one after all...

Things planned but never got to:

-paper bag puppets

-train tracks

-crepe paper pencil pictures

-blocks

-sewing cards

-paper shape collages

-paper Easter egg decorating

I think it went well.  The Frog asked, after the first 3 sessions, "Can we do conference again?"

Conference Activities

What a great weekend!  I always love General Conference- well, I have since I went to college and actually stayed awake during all 4 sessions :)  However, since having children, I haven't been able to pay attention as much as I wanted and it's always been quite stressful and contentious somehow.  I was determined to make this year better!

I got the idea (thank you Pinterest!) to make little activity bags- one for each of the apostles and members of the first presidency and prophet- and then I printed out and laminated these cards, putting one of each in each bag.  Then with every new speaker, we would go through all the bags and, together, try to determine if the picture in the bag was the same as the speaker.  I think The Frog had as much fun doing this as doing the activities.  I also had 3 other activities planned for when there was a long streak of other general authorities.

General commentary?  It worked great!  Yes, I still had to help entertain the kids, but I feel like I got sooo much more out of conference this year.  I can say that I at least got the overall topic from almost every speaker, which is leaps and bounds above the previous 4 years.

Here are the activities I chose:

• Stickers- one of the best activities, believe it or not.  Peach (2) and The Frog (4) both liked this and spent quite a bit of time on it because I gave them a bag of those foamy stickers that you have to peel the backs off of, which means it took more time to use each sticker :) We just put them on construction paper- their choice of color.
• Color with crayons, then water color on top- my kids just really seem to like watercolor, and doing crayons first just extended the time spent on it a bit.
• Glitter glue symmetry prints- scribble with glitter glue and then fold in half to reveal.  It was a bit quick, but when The Frog opened his up, he thought it was really cool.
• Draw with elmer's glue + glitter- too quick and too messy.  Won't do this again with young kids.
• Finger paints- I thought it would be fun to try having them paint on tin foil, but The Frog wasn't interested in that.  Peach did, but I'm realizing that for some reason, painting activities hold my kids' interest longer if they are allowed to use a paint brush.
• Painting toenails- this was an extra activity actually suggested by The Frog.  This one is especially good because they have to sit still while waiting for the polish to dry.  And they spend a good deal of time looking through all the colors and deciding what they want.
• Bead necklaces- this was an unassigned activity too and it was really really great for The Frog- Peach wasn't so interested and mostly threw beads everywhere.  I got out a muffin tin and The Frog and I spent a good amount of time just organizing them by color first, then he made his own necklace.  We did this Saturday morning session and the kids wore their necklaces (and tried on each other's) all weekend.  (I ended up just making one for Peach since she wasn't that interested, but she loves wearing it.)
• Toothpick and marshmallow sculptures- I was a bit worried about this because I hate handing out treats before lunch, but The Frog was very disciplined about not eating any of his sculptures until after lunch, and it was a fun, quiet, activity to do in the afternoon too!  The Frog got really into this and built some pretty cool things!  Peach mostly just kept sneaking a marshmallow and running away.  haha.

• Origami- I found a Halloween origami set at JoAnn's for $1.  It's a good idea, especially for the future, but a bit too old for my kids.  The Frog just watched me do it for him.  Peach was wholly uninterested.
• Halloween lanterns- I really like having these cute lanterns around, but I didn't plan it out very well.  I just kind of made this activity up.  I cut Halloween shapes out with my Silhouette, which, by the way, doesn't do great on construction paper.  Good to know.  I wish I had colored vellum lying around...  Anyway, we glued Halloween shapes to a white piece of paper and then wrapped them around a spaghetti sauce jar.  I quickly discovered that the shapes were not staying curved to the paper and I pretty much had to go over everything with packing tape.  Even so, I think they turned out super cute, and it was fun to light them during dinner and even breakfast this morning (it's darker out when we eat breakfast than dinner :D).
• Tissue paper and tape snakes- we just took tissue paper and crinkled it into a long "snake", then wrapped it with tape to get it to stay.  Didn't take as long as I hoped and I had to help The Frog more than I thought I would.  He did play with it briefly, but it didn't take as long to decorate as I had hoped.  Peach was uninterested, and instead hid balls of tissue paper in everyone's shoes.  So I guess she was quietly occupied...
• Cookies- since the beginning of the second Saturday session always begins with a lot of "business" items, I thought that might be a good time to bake and eat some cookies.  (I made the dough the night before).  It went over well, as you might imagine, and I felt good that we all had lunch already.
• Painting on wooden magnets- I got 2 of these little kits at JoAnn's for $1.  I didn't realize that the paint wasn't washable until I got them out to work on, but it worked out okay and both kids spent enough time on them to make it worth it.  I did have to be very controlling about having only 1 paint cup open at a time so we could wash our brushes and so I would only have to keep track of one color to not spill and stain everything.
• Play dough- this is normally great, but The Frog napped for the first half of the very last session of conference, so he kind of had a queue of crafts to work on and I think he wanted to do some of the other things that he doesn't play with regularly.  In the future, I might actually make play dough and part of the fun could be measuring the ingredients and kneading in the coloring.
• Legos- short lived for the same reason as above.
• Blocks- The Frog and I built a pretty cool castle, until Peach woke up from her nap and kept knocking everything over.

The Frog was so pleased with their projects, he wanted them hung up.  This is now our "Conference Craft door"

The Frog building with marshmallows and toothpicks

Halloween lanterns glowing at breakfast

Tissue paper and tape "snake"

Didn't do-

• Leaves- The Frog had collected some pretty leaves earlier in the week, so I pressed them and thought we could do something with them, but we kind of ran out of time, and it was one of the things that we would have done while The Frog was napping.
• Scissors and punches- we never did this one because it was associated with D. Todd Christofferson and he only spoke in the Priesthood session.  Typically, though, my kids love to go to town on blank piece of paper with a pair of scissors, especially when I get out my funny scissors with different cutting edges.

Some other things I want to remember:

Peach really loved listening to all the musical numbers and would sometimes request that Jay and I sing along with the Mo-tab or she would come in and sing her version of "I Am A Child of God" while the choir sang whatever they were singing.  So cute.

It was funny to hear The Frog compare the pictures to the speakers- "no, he doesn't have glasses", "this guy has white hair", "he's kinda fat- yeah, that's him!"

I'm very pleased with how the weekend went.  I made a special breakfast both days- waffles yesterday and pumpkin cinnamon rolls today- and we did a picnic lunch on the lawn yesterday.  I'm hoping that the kids will grow to love conference and look forward to it when it comes.

General (ly amazing) Conference

Well, they did it again. Conference was sooo great! I can't wait until the Ensign comes out so I can read through them again. I feel like ever sentence was so packed with goodness, that I missed out on a lot the first time through.
Go President Beck with her notion of women power! She's so awesome! And it was such a testament of the "world-wideness" of the gospel to have so many 70 speakers with accents! It was so awesome!! Although I must admit that it was hard to pay attention to Elder Christoffel Golden Jr. because the whole time I was debating with myself... "where's he from? It's either South Africa or New Zealand. I think South Africa. Wait maybe it IS New Zealand!" Turns out, he's from South Africa (once again Wikipedia saves the day). The Hinck was cuter than ever and I'm so excited about Eyring's new position. I just love listening to him speak, and I suspect we'll get to hear him more often now. :) Ohhhh, and my heart goes out to Elder Wirthlin!! Such a sweetheart! It was so hard to watch him up there shaking so much, but it was also amazing to see him struggle through, out of breath, so that he could say what he came to say- like it was so important, it needed to be said. I was a bit surprised by Elder Holland's zinger about the notion of the trinity being incomprehensible, though very true and very funny. It makes me realize how lucky we are to have these seemly-obvious-but-apparently-not-so-obvious things pointed out to us so that life makes sense! I just love the gospel!
Anyway, now I'll spiritual-high-ified and had to say my two cents. I'm pretty sure you can watch, listen to and/or read any of these online .

Oh yeah, and my little sister is engaged!