—1—
Now that our youngest is 9, general conference weekends at our house
are a lot calmer
than they used to be. Everyone sits quietly and the kids sometimes get a piece of paper to draw
on while they listen, and for the most part I don't have to do very much.
They even hand out the snacks we eat while watching.
For one of the sessions, however, we invited over a friend and her two young
children, and that was a whirlwind. Forget listening, my new job was doling
out new coloring pages and toys every 30 seconds when they got bored, answer
1 million questions that had nothing to do with conference, and prevent them
from injuring themselves or breaking something. Not that I minded, I
actually miss those days.
Plus, I love the things that come out of kids' mouths. The younger one told
my 13-year-old he's going to marry her (but not until he's 7), and the older
one was watching my 9-year-old struggle to open a snack and advised, "You
should ask my mom. She can push a car."
"It was probably in neutral," my 9-year-old told her.
"What's 'neutral'?" she asked.
—2—
What was my favorite general conference talk? Notable mentions definitely included "The Eternal Gift of Testimony" by Kevin B. Brown and "Jesus Christ and Your New Beginning" by Patrick Kearon, but my favorite was probably this one:
TL;DR: With Creole cooking, there's a seasoning called Tony's that makes everything taste better. We're trying to follow Jesus, but maybe our ingredients are inferior or maybe we have trouble following the recipe or maybe we make mistakes, but it's ultimately going to turn out if we just add more Tony's Jesus.
—3—
I was going through my camera roll to clean it out, and I realized that I have way too many pictures like this:
 |
| Seriously, how does anyone read instruction labels without taking a picture and blowing it up? |
I stopped being able to read that teen-tiny Tooth Fairy handwriting years ago, and now the photo library on my phone is 50/50 pictures of my kids and pictures of the backs of spraypaint cans and Advil bottles.
—4—
My 19-year-old arrived in Nevada this week! She's serving an 18-month mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
We've always interacted a lot with the missionaries that are serving in our area, but suddenly they seem a lot younger to me now that my daughter is one of them. So I would consider it a personal favor if, should you happen to meet a pair of nicely-dressed young adults with black name tags on, you were nice to them. Especially if you live in Nevada.
—5—
My 13-year-old's cross country meets always conflict with my 9-year-old's gymnastics drop-off half an hour away, so I usually don't get to watch them. But I did go and catch the end of her meet this week!
Cross country races are 5K (3.1 miles) and they kind of wind through the woods (hence the name) and when one kid ran out into the clearing about halfway through, he only had one shoe.
I assume it was sucked off in the mud or just fell off, but I don't understand why he left it behind, instead of stopping to put it back on and keep going. It couldn't possibly take longer to tie a shoe than the time you'd lose running lopsided over 1+ miles of sticks and rocks in your sock foot, could it?
—6—
After many years of raising boys and also being married to one, I've started
to realize that emotional literacy is something that doesn't come naturally
to XY-oriented people. Sometimes I need to think out my feelings to grasp all the nuances, but boys seem to be capable of genuine confusion about their own emotions or even be totally oblivious to them, which is wild to me.
Is this the male equivalent of poor spatial awareness? When I say I'm not good
with maps, I can tell that Phillip doesn't even
understand what I mean. Like how can you not be "good" at knowing where
you are if you have functioning eyes and a brain? Well, I think
I get it now. Their feelings are my maps.
However, I have no idea how to improve my spatial awareness and no idea how
to work on emotional literacy with my boys at home. Suggestions welcome.
—7—
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