General Conference

I love this time of the year, and I'm so grateful that it comes around twice a year.  It's something that I look forward to, and it seems to arrive at the perfect time when I am in need of answers, comfort, and guidance from my Heavenly Father through the different leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, including our dear Prophet, President Thomas S. Monson! 

It was the first year that Jaden knew what was going on and why we weren't going to church on Sunday and why we were going to watch "church" on TV.  I knew that it would be long for a 3 year-old, so I turned to the internet to find ideas of how to make it exciting, fun, reverent, and full of learning for kids!  I seem to find all of "my" cool ideas online, so thank goodness for that!

I thought at most, that these activities and stuff that I planned for him were going to be more of a distraction than anything else, while I attempted to listen to the speakers.  But I was pleasantly surprised!  Jaden did surprisingly well during those 2 hours, he just got a little fidgety during the last 15 minutes of it; that is to be expected though. 

I found this great idea called the "Reverent Tent".  Basically it goes off of King Benjamin (in the Book of Mormon) preaching to his people while they were camping out around the city in tents with their families listening to his words and counsel.  So, this morning before Conference even started, I told Jaden about King Benjamin and his people in the tents and how we are going to build our own tent, with the opening towards the TV, to listen to the messages that are being said to us by the leaders of the Church.  He was so excited to build a "tent".  I kept calling it a fort but was corrected almost immediately after.  Side note: in order for Jaden to understand who King Benjamin was, I had to tell him who his son was, so he would really get the picture.  Let's face it, what little boy will forget the story of Ammon and the sheep and the cutting off the arms of bad guys' after you tell him the story once?  Not many... Pretty cool how he is making these connections.  He really gets the father-son relationships well, and compares it to him and Cory...makes me happy!  Don't laugh at the tent.  I tried.  Cory will have to build a better one next year.  Forts are just not my forte.  I mean tents.

Of course we had to have lunch and snacks :)...I hid them from view, so he wouldn't be thinking about them the whole time and eat them in the first 30 minutes. 

I printed off activity packets for him to do in order to help him pay attention to at least some of what was going on.  The "My Conference Journal" was my favorite thing that I printed off for Jaden.  He was able to practice writing his name, draw what we looked like watching Conference, draw what the Conference Center looked like, draw what his favorite thing was that we did for Conference, write three words that President Monson said in his talk, and some other fun things.  He really enjoyed it!

This is another idea I found online.  It's a picture of the Salt Lake Temple, and all I did was punch holes around it and he "sewed" a shoe lace around it.  It helps him practice hand-eye coordination, keeps his hands busy, and occupies him for about 10 minutes.  He loved this one, too!

This is a Conference Bingo card.  Anytime he heard a speaker say one of the words that was on the card, he put an M&M on the square.  We didn't play actual Bingo on it, we just tried to fill up the entire card...which we came close to doing!

Working on his little Journal.  He is drawing in himself right now..

And that was our experience with Conference.  If you all watched it, too, then I hope you were able to take messages out of the talks that were meant for you!  Love you all!