Every six months we get to come up with some creative idea of keeping the kids interested in paying some attention to General Conference. I don’t like Kyle and I being the only ones in the house that are trying to sit and listen to all the talks, while the kids run around the house like crazy. I want them to learn that when conference is on, we sit and listen, although I know that sitting still for four hours on Saturday and another 4 hours on Sunday is asking a lot out of our small kids. Before conference last October, one of my visiting teachers brought over a few ‘Conference Bingo’ cards that she had made, and a bag of candy corn to use as markers. The only problem was that the bingo cards had words on them, so only my kiddos that know how to read were able to use them. So I looked around online and found some pictures so that Kyle could put together some bingo cards for the younger kids to use.
Saturday morning they were really excited to get to play conference bingo like they did last time, and they were happy when we pulled out the new bingo cards with pictures on them, because now there was one for each of them. And this time, instead of candy corn they got to use jelly beans for markers. That seemed to keep them interested during the morning session. And some of them were still napping when the afternoon session started, so we didn’t have to keep them interested for the whole session.
Today we started the day off with some baked french toast, and bacon and hashed browns for breakfast. I have found that to make hashed browns nice and crispy, the heat for the oil has to be up nice and high. Well I guess I had the heat on high enough, but it must have taken me too long to get the next portion of potatoes in the pan because the oil started smoking and it set the smoke alarms off. Of course, the loud beeping noise all through the house made all the kids scream. Why they felt like they had to add to the noise…I don’t know. If there had been a real fire we would have been in trouble, because not one of the kids got up. They all just sat where they were and screamed. I guess we need to work on that.
We continued with the bingo cards for the Sunday sessions of conference, and that means the kids have had a whole bunch of jelly beans in the last two days. But they were losing interest in actually playing bingo today, so I think I need to find some other ideas for keeping them interested in conference so that they can play conference for one session and do something for another.