Conference Again

It's General Conference weekend!

I'm taking just a moment to write in between sessions. Right now my kids are playing in the backyard and I have a tiny bit of peace and quiet.

General Conference is the weekend where the church has five sessions broadcast over Saturday and Sunday, where we get to hear from all the leaders. Best of all, we get to hear what the prophet thinks is most important for us to hear in the current climate. It's something I look forward to (strange as listening to 8 hours of religious talks may seem to some people).

When I was a kid, it was totally different. I still looked forward to conference weekend, but it was usually because we often took trips out of town. Since neither of my parents needed to be at church for their callings, I remember a lot of trips to Vegas to visit my grandparents. If we didn't go out of town, it was a weekend when I didn't have to go to church, always a reason for rejoicing.

It's funny how different things are now for me.

My kids look forward to conference weekend too. But it's completely different than it was for me as a kid. Believe it or not, my kids willing sit through all four regular sessions of their own free will. (Well, everyone but K. He kind of wanders in and out at this stage.) I don't force them to be in here. Terence has made it a requirement that they stay through at least one whole session on Sunday, but he never has to enforce it because the kids are usually in the room, impatiently waiting before he even is.

The secret is in the activities. Activity packets (the favorite is bingo) and almost always, there is candy involved. I usually find something online that the kids can fill out and color, and there is usually a bag of well-loved candy that I use as rewards for various things. This year, our primary presidency decided to do something similar for encouragement and sent home activity packets with all the kids, promising that if they brought them back all filled in, they would get a special treat.

I thought it was a great idea at first. But it turned out not to work at all for our family. I scrapped the program during the first session, telling my kids that they could still fill in their packets, but nobody would be turning one in next Sunday, whether it was filled out or not. Instead we played our normal bingo, they colored ties and other pictures, and got treats when they were in the room for a new speaker.

Why did I toss the Primary incentive?

It was quickly apparent that there was so much pressure for my kids to get everything filled out and not miss anything, that they would not leave me in peace to just listen. They wanted my help in completing everything, and there was a lot of contention between them. (Apparently one box of crayons when all the kids are trying to color the same kind of tie just means a shoving match is in the works.) Besides, the stuff that B would have had to fill out in her packet was impossibly difficult for a 6 year old. She can barely write at all, let alone tackle a word search that had more than 100 terms to find.

Yes, I want to encourage my kids to pay attention to conference. But most important, I want to be able to listen to conference, which is difficult at best with four kids. Not that all went perfectly once I told them they wouldn't be turning the packets in. But it was far less noisy and distracting, and I enjoyed it much better. I think we'll keep that up for the last session as well. Difficult as it is to watch conference with the kids, I am so grateful that I got to hear it though. Some of the speakers gave me some much needed encouragement and I felt lifted out of my recent gloom. Just what I needed!