LDS General Conference Weekend

First off, I'm so behind here. To my children, if you look back at this blog and come to wonder how I blogged "everyday" and ran a household with 11 children, just know that at this moment in time, the house is a pretty big mess, I am still catching up trying to blog posts from August right now, not to mention that we're now in October and I've only done 10 days of September.  That being said, today was a pretty good day on productivity. For example, I made dinner tonight again! Leftover vegetable barley soup from yesterday that was fabulous, plus some cucumber tomato salad and also, for the omnivores in the family, we cooked up some beef stroganoff from our food storage. I think I'm going to use those more often - we had a ton of food storage that I wouldn't mind putting to good use to save a little bit of $ in the grocery budget. Plus it's a good way to keep the meat eaters happy without Corey going to buy groceries again using up my budget buying garbage. Go ahead and buy some eggs and milk if you must, but can we skip the Nutella?  He does it "so the kids aren't confused about what you need or don't need to do for a temple recommend", blah blah. I asked him how often they need to be reminded that being vegan is not required? And I don't even do it 100% all the time (had some egg noodles tonight) Plus, sweetie, I'm happy to tell them and have told them that too, but is it necessary to show them on a weekly/daily basis? I think their memories are good enough that they don't need to be reminded this often. Maybe I just need to have more food available, cause they look around and can't see anything to eat in a fridge full of vegetables. But Nutella? Do we have to torture poor Hyrum and me? Plus, like anybody is going to eat my vegetable soup if they know that pretty soon someone will whip up crepes with Nutella. And speaking of making more food for yourselves after dinner... Children- can we all just eat dinner and then be done for the night? Do we really need this 9 or 10 pm post dinner feeding? Can we establish some routines and schedules that we all follow?! Ugh, so hard getting to bed around here! Which messes up my morning... I can't keep surviving on this 5 hours of sleep a day. Maybe I should retire from my "family alarm clock" duty. But that would mean our whole life falls apart... sigh. Well, atleast Daniel is sleeping though the night though, that's really nice. Ok, done with my rant...

So, General Conference - It was wonderful. My ears were tuned in to hear things about establishing habits and routines and I got a lot of answers. I also loved Elder Tad Callister's talk on Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. On a few of the talks I didn't take notes cause my hands were busy holding Daniel (or about to be, as shown in the pic below)

Or during the second Sunday session I was loading the dishwasher. But Elder Callister's talk was one where I was sitting hands free and could have taken notes but I didn't want to cause I didn't want to miss the next thing he said. He hit it out of the park, loved it. The Book of Mormon is all true or maybe Joseph Smith was just "a very lucky guesser" lol - yeah right! I'll come back and update that with the link once it's up online. Plus I'll add the other talks that were meant for me. Great weekend. And today was day 1 of putting them into practice. I got up early and exercised and used my time wisely today. Still working on the best schedule for me, but I got off on a good start, hoping to tune it more this week.

BTW, another reality check for my posterity - this is what watching General Conference looks like around here:

Nevermind, I can't find my phone. Come back later... but I'll describe it... it's:

Lots o-people sitting in chairs (some falling asleep as in this pic from April 2017-pic 1 and 2) or laying on the floor with blankets. The kids did try to take notes, Abi and up. Lily and under were playing with toys most of the time but they'd come in now and then. One cute story - Lily came in during the first session with urgent news: there was a fire. Corey asked "A real fire?" Well, she said there was smoke. Corey jumped up and went in her room. She pointed out the window where there was clearly lava and smoke on the mountain (aka very red fall trees and low lying clouds). We got a good laugh out of that. But I can see how it would look like lava to a creative and imaginative little girl like Lily. So with the little girls, we didn't worry too much about nagging them to come listen. If they were in the room with us "listening" there was a good chance that we wouldn't be able to hear anything, cause they'd be jumping or wiggling or making noise. They took advantage of the chance to play without us nagging them to clean up or work, good girls.

Update: found my phone. Here's our conference picture. How many kids can you see? I spy 9. Joseph and Ethan are not present. They watched it in the side room, most of us watched most sessions in our room.

Corey is in upward dog, getting up after having his fill of kids climbing on him. Mel drawing. Hyrum taking notes and paying attention (good kid) Wes ready to give Owen a hug. Daniel watching Owen and taking mental notes on how to behave. Lily is on our bed drawing. Natalie is hard to see, but she is on our bed drawing too... You can see her little brown head looking closely at her paper.