Conference Craft Run Down

Hey friends! 

 The stomach flu hit our house a couple of days ago and there's not a chance in the world that I get all of the blogging done that I was planning to this week. Booo. 

 I know that Gen Conf crafts take a bit of planning/buying materials, etc...so I decided to compile a list of our favs quickly here for you! 

 Here is a list of crafts that we've tried and loved - along with a Pinterest board I've saved all of the tutorials to!

  Salt Dough! 

 -We love making this at least twice a year for Conference...but it also comes out at Christmas time to make ornaments, on boring rainy days, etc. Grab some food coloring and you're off to the races with endless creative possibilities! 

Easter Egg Suncatchers!

 -We did these this week. Easy, inexpensive. Perfect quiet craft. We colored them with Sharpies (older kids), acrylic paint (stains clothing - so wear play clothes), and also did cut up tissue paper squares with Elmer's glue (older kids). Love love these. They look so pretty in our windows! 

Prayer Rocks!

 -We love doing the traditional "PRAY"-er rock style, but we've also done extras with happy, friendly words and pictures. We put them outside on our front walk. You can find river rocks on Amazon, but I've found that they're significantly cheaper if you go to a craft store like Michaels (or even the craft department at WalMart) instead of shipping them. Paint pens are easy to find on Amazon! 

Popsicle Stick Treasure Boxes!

-My kids LOVE these. You can put them together using Modge Podge or hot glue (you decide what works best for your kids' ages). You can either buy the pre-dyed rainbow sticks, or use the plain sticks and paint them afterward. We've decorated these with beads and glitter afterward, too, or lined the inside with felt. You can tie this in to Gen Conf with the scripture about storing up our treasure in heaven. 

Tin Foil Hearts! 

 -I love the scripture about Christ engraving His love for us on His palms and us engraving our love for Him on the tablets of our hearts. We did a quick chat about that during a song between talks and then handed out the hearts for our kids to decorate. We used the back of paintbrushes to etch the designs. There was a bit of a learning curve in not tearing the foil. but luckily foil is easily replaced. My kids loved writing words and drawing designs that reminded them of God's love for them and their love for God (mostly in the form of things they're grateful for and people in their lives who they love!). 

Magnets! 

 -These are always a favorite. They're a little more time-intensive and require me to be very hands-on, but it probably would be easier with fewer kids. You can either draw pictures or use pretty designed paper for these - my kids love drawing their own designs. It's so fun to make magnets for our own fridge, and make extras for Grandparents or neighbors!

Journals!

 -I've found that my kids are much more likely to take notes if they like whatever they're writing on/in! We've made Gen Conf notebooks in several different ways - usually in the day or two before conference. It's a fun craft to get them excited about taking notes! We give treats for notes...the rule is if you take three notes, you earn a candy at the end of the talk! The notes can be whatever they want - part of a story, words they heard, a picture of the speaker, etc. I've ordered notebooks from Amazon before (click here) to decorate, or we've made them out of boxes or cereal boxes (like on the Pinterest board I linked above). 

  

 **This conference I ordered these absolutely adorable and practical kid workbooks (from Work and Wonder) from Deseret Book's website. They're $15/ea. I can't even explain how awesome these are. Click here to score your own! I'll let you guys know if they make a difference in our note taking at all...**

Puppets!

-The picture I posted on my IG about this blog post shows the cutest little puppets! We ordered the kit from Amazon for $13. They're adorable, SUPER easy...my kids basically did these themselves. One kit makes eight puppets - and the possibilities for creativity are endless. You can hot glue these OR use the little glue dots that come in the kit! We ended up with lots of extra pieces left over after we made these guys - which means we could make accessories or pretend food for our puppets. Highly recommend! Link here.

Peg People!

 - My kids love painting families of peg people! This is the pack we bought on Amazon. I recommend painting these with acrylic paint (play-clothes only! they stain!), but Sharpies also work. I've found that spending a bit of time painting peg people and then doing a different craft while the first layer dries keeps my kids from getting super bored with any single craft. By the time they've wrapped up something else, their peg people are ready for final touches (googly eyes, yarn hair, etc). These peg people are pretty small, but you could spring for larger ones if you care to! This is a craft my kids have played with for months after conference!

Happy Conference crafting, friends!! xo

   

Gen Conf Sugar Cube Temples!

Hey friends!

For the last several years, I've collected (and created) some easy craft ideas that help keep my babes quiet and reverent during General Conference. I thought it might be nice to share some of them with you all as we approach the April sessions - just in case you need help containing the craziness of children during conference, too 🧡 

My kids love Conference - and my hope is that as they get older, they'll transition from excitement over treats and crafts to excitement over feeling the spirit. (I'll check in in about a decade and let you know how it works out for us...)

DISCLAIMER: I'm not a professional blogger - I'm a very busy Mom of six. You're going to have to forgive my lack of amazing professional pics here, folks. Please see my very unprofessional home video of this specific craft at the end of the post haha. You're welcome!

I'll be posting as many of our crafts as I can before conference rolls around in a couple of weeks - starting wiiiiith...::drum rolllll:::

Sugar Cube Temples

This is my kids' fav craft we do at Gen Conf time. Is it because they love engineering their very own temples because they are so very righteous? Or is it because they love having a delicious supply of sugar cubes in their bedroom room for the six months following GC when they get to build another one..? The world may never know...

In any case, they love it and it keeps them quietly entertained and engaged for at least a few talks.

Supplies needed:

-sugar cubes! (duh)  // You can get them in the baking aisle at any grocery store. I usually get each kid two boxes. You can get more or less depending on how big you feel like building them.

-glue! // I've found that Elmer's glue works the best - but BEWARE...sugar cubes dissolve if they get too wet! see below for more info... we've tried Modge Podge, hot glue, glue sticks, etc...white craft glue works best!

-a surface to build on! // We've used everything from paper plates to cardboard boxes to foam board. 

-decorations! // The first couple of years we did this, we kept it very simple with no extra decorations - just sugar cubes on paper plates. The kids love this craft so much, though, that we've gotten more and more creative with it lately - see below for more. 

Directions:

1. Plan out how large you want your temple to be. Grab your building surface and decide how many cubes you're going to use for the perimeter. For younger kids, I've found that marking a square or rectangle out on your building surface with a pencil helps them from building wonky/unstable walls. They can just follow your outline!

2. Pour glue into a bowl or onto a plate and dip! Lightly dip each sugar cube square into the glue and place it on your building surface. *LIGHTLY DIP is the key phrase here...if you submerge your entire sugar cube in glue it will slowly dissolve! Ack! We tried using paintbrushes to paint the glue on one year and it worked for a minute, but inevitably the kids got tired of it and went back to dunking. Just do whatever works for you!

3. Stack your cubes! You must hold the sugar cubes for a few seconds after you place them beside/on top of each other so they bond together - it might take a minute to find your best sugar/glue ratio for making them stick. The good news is that your learning curve will be accompanied by sticky and sweet mistakes! (...even if they get a little glue in their mouths with the sugar,  Elmer's is nontoxic, right?? haha...it's fine...) 

*My younger kids don't add a roof - they're just not coordinated enough to manage the drying times or build high enough walls. So their temples look more like forts, but it's cool. They'll be stoked if you're stoked! My older kids leave spaces for windows and doors, build steeples and separate rectangles of sugar cubes to add (after they've dried) as roofs!  

                                    For parents of super little kids, you're done! That's it!
                                         OR for parents looking to keep things simple? DONE! The end!

For everyone else:

4. Make it beautiful! As we've grown to love this craft, we've added the following to our process:

-paint: before we tried any of the other ideas listed below, we got out some paint and painted grass and flowers around our temples on the paper plates we built them on. It's a fun way to finish off the project. You could also START the project by painting the grounds, too! That would probably be even easier!

-mini landscaping: you can buy a pack of trees, bushes, flowers and rocks on Amazon. DM or comment here for the link and I'll find you the ones I buy! We stick them on using hot glue.

-modeling clay angel Moroni toppers: this part helps the craft absorb more time and adds a new tactile component. Just when my kids are getting sick of sticking sugar cubes together, it's time to bust out the modeling clay and they're reengaged in a snap.

-fake grass: I purchased a roll of fake grass last conference and I wish I had been filming their faced when I brought it out haha. They were SO EXCITED that their temples were going to look like they were actually ON temple grounds! They loved it.

-let your kids pick their fav temple and print out a picture for them to use as they build! I have dreams of doing this craft still when my kids are bigger (traditions are my favorite!), and I imagine making it competitive (timed temple building) or turning it into a guessing game (whoever can guess which temple the others made wins a prize) or whatever!

Unrequited Love and Remembering What I Know

You know what hurts? Unrequited love.

I remember my first experience with that kind of hurt happened in third grade.

(haha! I actually just snorted laughing at how ridiculous that is! Oh heavens.)

Derek Simper.

He cared more about baseball at recess than he did about marrying me.

(actually I'm not even sure he knew who I was in the third grade. so, in all fairness maybe he WOULD have wanted to marry me if we had, in fact, been properly introduced.)

(see? this is why I blog. I wasn't expecting to make peace with that this morning, at yet here I am.)

Anyways.

It really hurt.

I wanted him to want to talk to me and chase me at recess and think I had pretty hair and tell me my backpack was cool.

He did none of those things. (rude.)

Lest you think that youthful experience with unrequited love was a solitary one confined only to my elementary school years...pick any of my older sister's boyfriends and I promise I felt that with them (except for the few that I ended up dating after her. I'm not sure why. Maybe I just was totally incapable of originality as a teenager? Maybe I just didn't trust my own judgement, so I just decided to like whoever she did? I'm not sure haha but I'm sure it was insanely annoying to her! Sorry, Nik!).

College was the same. Lots of dudes I liked didn't like me.

(who are these men?! did they even have eyeballs in college?!)

You know what I WASN'T expecting, though..?

The weirdness that is loving your children more than they love you.

Especially when that weirdness comes as a result of blending a family.

I had kind of hoped that my earlier blog on this subject would be the beginning and end of my need to talk to about this. Like the summer would just resolve all of the issues involved and it would be put to rest forever and we'd be seamlessly blended by the time the school year started again.

Wouldn't that have been lovely?

I think so, too.

Last week one of the kids was chatting with Violet and the conversation turned to wishing things were the way they were before.

'Before' meaning...before we were a family.

I wasn't there for the convo, so I can't say for certain what exactly was said...but the overall sentiment was that things were somehow better before.

(for clarity's sake: we just had a baby a few weeks ago and everyone is exhausted and running on fumes. I get why this conversation would be coming out in light of how the last month or so has gone. new babies mean the older kids don't get as much attention or exciting parent time...because the parents are usually in survival mode.)

Even knowing all of that ↑, though...hearing that the kids somehow prefer the way that it used to be over how awesome it is now? It made my chest hurt.

I get it. I really do. But it still really, really hurt.

It made me wish for time to fast forward ten years. In ten years from now, we'll have been a family for almost 11 years! Whoa! Hopefully I won't be blogging blogs on this subject anymore (enter nervous smiley emoji with the sweat drop on forehead). We'll have our oldest heading off the college (oooooook I had to take a break for a minute to cry postpartum hormonal tears of sadness thinking about the fourth grader leaving...), and Ava will be rioiweohtoheghuehoeiowiowrqiqhqh

Ok I can't type about how big our kids will be in 10 years because I'm crying too much and I have to finish this blog before Ava needs to eat again.

YOU GET THE PICTURE.

In ten years we'll have had a lot of time to BE together as a family.

But how do I make sure my heart doesn't hurt so much in the next few years of blending that I close off..? Sometimes it feels like I WANT to close off...step back somehow. Protect myself from the uncomfortable comments and unintentionally hurtful comparisons.

I'm not the way that it was. I'm the way it is now.

...and that's hard sometimes - for all of us.

****

When I first found out I was pregnant, I thought about canceling my Time Out for Women/Girls event in Sacramento this last weekend. I knew I'd have a five week old, and that I would be recovering from a c-section (and that recovering from my first c-section was an absolute nightmare). As I prayed about it, though, I felt like everything would be ok...that I should still do it.

I didn't feel particularly nervous about it until a few weeks ago when Ava first came. I looked and felt like I'd been hit by a bus and I wasn't particularly excited about getting up on stage in that condition haha. Again I prayed - and again I felt reassurance that everything would be ok...so I packed up my babe and husband and headed to CA on Friday morning.

The event was wonderful. I only missed my cues to be on stage twice (ha! ugh!!) (in my defense, I was nursing backstage for the second one and was truly caught off guard. my bad, guys.) and even though I was so, unbelievably tired, I felt so grateful to be back. Time Out feels like home in so many ways to me now - and I didn't realize how badly I needed to connect with that feeling.

As I was mulling all of the blending-family/unrequited-love-issues over in my head this morning,  I thought of Time Out for Women this weekend in Sacramento. I thought about standing on that stage in front of hundreds of girls (and thousands of women) and testifying that our worth lies in who we are - not what we do (or don't do). I thought about testifying about God's timing...that our hurts and pains and struggles are meant to SANCTIFY us, to perfect us...not to destroy us.

And then I thought about Elder Boyd K Packer teaching us that "a testimony is...found in the bearing of it."

I suddenly felt like my being at Time Out was just for me this weekend. I needed to remember those things. I needed to reconnect with that testimony that I learned and earned through years of struggle and questioning.

Even when I want my kids to love me as much as I love them - to want me and choose me and love me...but they don't? I still have (and will always have) God's love - and that is more than enough. It's ok for them to take their time. It's ok for it to not happen all at once. I am worthy of love, I am good enough, I am loved and seen and known by a God who chooses me every single day.

Even when the struggle of learning how to be a mom to all of my kiddos and this new baby (and try to continue building relationships with new family members and maintain relationships with my original family members and friends and callings and etc etc) feels overwhelming and like I'm failing WAY more than I'm succeeding...

Even when the weight of that failure feels heavy and I want to run away...

Even when all of those things are true/present - I believe that God's timing is perfect, and that all of these things are working together for my good (Romans 8:28).

The hurt? The struggle? It doesn't have to have a quick, easy resolution.

I know how to handle struggle.

And I bet you do, too.

****

I'm putting this blog out in to the universe today because I needed to remember something I already knew. I was forgetting to connect with what I'd already knew; and remembering feels like taking a breath of fresh air. So...maybe...hopefully...reading this will make you take a second to ask yourself what it is that YOU might need to reconnect with. What are the truths you have already learned in your life (that maybe you've forgotten) that could help you face your challenges today?

Sometimes all we want is to see the light at the end of the tunnel, right? To know the end of the struggle is coming soon?

I once read something really profound about the light at the end of the tunnel and wanted to leave it here at the end of this blog to wrap things up (so I googled it, duh). Before I found it, though, I came across these gems that I want to share first:

-The light at the end of the tunnel isn't an illusion; the tunnel is.
-The light at the end of the tunnel is your life; it's the tunnel that's temporary.
-I stopped waiting for the light at the end of the tunnel and lit it up myself.

and my favorite:

-The light at the end of the tunnel might be an oncoming train.

(hahahaha just dark enough without being tooooo dark, right? ...right, guys..? ...guys?)

When I finally DID find the quote - I realized it actually doesn't reference a tunnel at all (oops) but it's still awesome:

"I'm not waiting for the sun to shine; the light, it comes from within me." - xan oku

Remember what you know.

Remember that the light comes from within you (a gift from God) when you find yourself in that deep, dark tunnel.

Stay strong, my friends. Have the best Monday. ♡