Busy Saturday

Saturday October 1st was a busy morning for us.  It started out at 9 am when the whole family had to be up and dressed in decent outfits for our family picture.  The beginning of the school year the elementary and middle schools have sign ups at the open house for family portraits.  You pay like $20 and you get an 11 X 14 family picture.  The entire $20 goes to the school and the photograph company comes back to the school on a designated weekend and takes your picture.  I was the second person to sign up at the middle school so I picked the first time slot they had on Saturday.  It was a good thing I did because the Roswell Youth Day Parade changed it date from Oct. 8 (because of Yom Kippur) to October 1st.  The kids did a great job and Connor did better than we could have hoped.  The last time we had a professional picture of our family was when Brenton was 2 1/2 and Connor was 1.  We have had professional pictures of all the kids about every couple years but non with Jon and I in them.  The pictures turned out great and I am so glad I can check that off my list.  So after we got our pictures taken Jon headed over to our church building for a funeral.  Our last Bishop's father died.  While he was at that I took the kids to the youth day parade.  The kids love this parade and look forward to it every year.  Of course, all the kids got plenty of candy.  After the parade was over, we had to head home to get ready to watch General Conference.    I enjoyed all the talks from conference and since then I have enjoyed listening to the talks again on my ipad every Tuesday morning I would put a talk on and listen to it while driving to the temple and then after.  It took me a couple months to relisten to them all.  I used to try and read them all in the Ensign, but could never finish them all before the next months Ensign issue.  So this way I could do 2 things at once drive and listen and get my goal accomplished after many failed attempts. 

Conference

The first week of October is always General Conference weekend. I love that we have BYU TV and can watch conference from the comfort of our own home. I usually have some sort of cooking or organizing thing to do while I'm watching conference. I have to be doing something to keep myself focused on the talks or else my mind will wander in a daze after listening to conf. for that many hours. This year I didn't do much cooking besides the normal lunch and dinner. Instead, I organized our closet/minibar in our family room. This has been on my list of things to organize for months. I thought since I am in this room for at least 4 hours on Saturday I might as well. It looks so nice now and will be easy to keep it clean and organized because now there is a place for everything. Jon only caught the last 45 minutes of the second session of conference. He was in charge of one of the day of service projects for our ward. Our stake as well as many others in our area were assigned to help out with clean up for the flood victims in Austell. Our ward had a great turn out especially since every General Conference in October our stake does a day of service in the morning before the conference starts. So there were already 3 service projects that had to be filled with people plus this flood assignment on top of that. Our ward members stayed together during the flood service project and were able to completely gut 2 houses. This is including taking out all the furniture, clothes, and other household items. All on top of removing the drywall, insulation, kitchen cabinets, appliances, counters and all that stuff.
On Sunday we make the kids watch conference with us. They did very well. We had a few activities to keep their mind focused on the talks. I love getting that extra boost every General Conference. It helps me refocus on the things that are most important in my life.