Youth Conference Prep

On Sunday, Abi set up the tent in the back yard. The kids slept out there that night. But Owen and Daniel were being crazy, so Abi brought them back inside. Corey was trying to work on Youth Conference stuff (crunch time, it is this weekend), so I tried to keep them away from him. I tried to put them to bed, but they weren't having it. So around midnight I gave up and decided to blog. Ethan took them and put them to bed, and I blogged until 4:30 am. We all woke up late today, but since we stayed up so late, the little boys crashed. Daniel fell asleep at the counter, that was a first!

I moved him over to the side room with Owen.

All the kids were over at the church yesterday helping Corey with one of the activities - they were making boxes to use as building stones for an activity for Youth Conference. Here is the powerpoint presentation of activity 1.3

Two slides for context...

And then here's the temple Hyrum and the kids made yesterday for the demonstration photo.

Mel and Abi couldn't leave it there and had to go home and make an Angel Moroni -

So Moroni didn't make the photo, but he'll be there for the activity. Fun huh! It looks like the Dude Perfect Golden boy dolls, haha.

Corey's really been working so hard on the Youth Conference. On Sunday he and I substituted teaching for the youth Sunday school class, and Corey took the opportunity to give a short peek at it to the youth there.  I think it's gonna be really cool. I hope it all continues to come together for him! It is this week on Wednesday night and then Thursday morning through Saturday.

So I stayed up late/early until 4:30 Monday morning blogging, then slept in till like 8, and I didn't exercise but went straight at blogging again. I finally caught up on April, and I'm almost done with May. I took care of what priorities, and right now that was catching up. And I'd really like to figure out a plan to stay on top of it and not let myself get behind again! I need to change the environment in our home to one of order and systems. I think that would help me blog regularly. As it is, it's like we just run from one party to another, or one fire to another. Let's go do this activity and that activity, followed by lets fix this mess and that mess. I have to twist arms of the older kids to get them to come for activities and I have to follow up with most of the kids to get them to come help clean or practice. It's just normal life I guess, and I do think overall we make progress from year to year and are able to handle more. But life seems to often take it up a notch. Daniel's taken it up a notch by learning this past week how to get out of his crib. So he won't go down for naps. So usually just crashes somewhere. Today he crashed as he sat at the table eating.

All the little boys are taking it up right now by getting up super early for some reason, even though we are all staying up too late at night. So I am not having my morning to myself. This morning I pushed Peter in the stroller for my walk, Wesley came with me, we did a few laps around the block and Peter went back to sleep, atleast until we moved him out of the stroller.

Here is another cute picture of Peter from today!

Oh he is so lovely. Adding a new kid every 2 years or so has definitely been one of the ways that life keeps taking it up a notch for us. I feel like we've almost figured out how to juggle things with him. It's nice having the older kids all home to help (when they are able help...)

Hopefully We'll be able to work out more kinks this summer before the school year starts again.