The feeling of "General Conference" is in the air

I love General Conference. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints assembles two weekends a year, in April and October, to listen to church leaders and get a full dose of Spirit for the next six months. I look forward to conference weekend for several weeks before it actually arrives. I’ve been thinking about it for a few weeks now.

I like to listen to talks in my car from the previous conference. I have made some attempt to keep a growing list of my favorite talks and listen to them in the car too. We used to have to buy the CDs from ldsdistribution.org, but now they put the mp3s on lds.org and I download them within hours or days and burn them to CD. I didn’t want my several years’ worth of sets to go to waste so I gave them to other people to listen to. I was happy to get back so many “thank you”s. The warm fuzzies made it all worth it!

The new signin on the church’s web site allows users to keep notes online. I’ve been marking conference talks mainly, but also making some notes in the scriptures. That came in handy one Sunday in particular. I can’t remember if I blogged about it or not, but I’ve told the story many times. One Sunday there was a mix up with the elders quorum instructor and nobody had prepared the lesson. I borrowed an iPad, accessed my notes on the conference talk and we had a nice lesson.

I love technology.

I also love that song from Naponeon Dynamite, where I got those words/lyrics.

One silly thing about scheduling General Conference is that it’s not on “the first weekend of April/October”. It’s actually on the first Sunday and the Saturday preceding it. The “numbers guy” inside of me has been looking forward to this happening for a long time. I’m sure it’s happened in my life, but I don’t remember when. I’m happy to see that it’s happening this month. Conference starts on Saturday, March 31. Woo!

Our family has a tradition for watching General Conference that we started to get the kids excited to watch it. We talk about this tradition leading up to it and Skyler has already been talking about it. What do we do? We make peanut butter popcorn and chow down as soon as the first session starts. We have usually made a double batch, but found that it’s way too much for us. That was enough popcorn to give us a treat during several of the sessions and still have some left over after Conference weekend. We have trimmed down our consumption to one batch.

Here’s the recipe. It's from our friends, T&L.

2 poppers popped popcorn, remove unpopped kernels
1/2 cup white karo syrup
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup white sugar
1 cup peanut butter
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp salt

Cook the sugar, honey and syrup for 2 minutes. Remove from heat and add the vanilla, salt and peanut butter. Drizzle over the popcorn and stir. (This is the end of the recipe. Try it. And enjoy. Thank me later! :) )

The peanut butter really stands out in this recipe. It’s probably all the sugar and corn syrup. We actually halved the sugar in the recipe and I think it’s tastier now. It was too sweet before. (The recipe listed here has the amount of sugar we use.)

It's a Good Day for Ice Cream

The coolest thing happened a little while ago with my oldest boy. He repeated something back to me that confirmed a really good habit that I've been trying to teach my kids. What he said was, "It's a good day for ice cream."

Even though my kids are young and small, I believe the two pieces of advice that older parents have given me about teaching the gospel. 1) Kids are never too young to learn and 2) out of all the things you say, you never know what will really stick in their minds. So teach them continually and begin when they're young.

Here's the habit that came back to bite me in the bum shake my hand and tell me good job: after doing service, take the boys out for ice cream.

I've been taking my boys to service projects and to help families move in/out of our ward for several years. I started taking them before I thought they could even be any positive use in the actual project. In fact, I thought it was so important for them to see service in action that I took them to activities where I would have to watch out for them and be of little use myself. It was a tough internal battle as I made that decision, but I'm glad I did it.

Now my boys are (well, my older boy is) excited to do service. A few weeks ago I was headed out to help with a move and I thought there would only be a couple people there. I only told my wife ahead of time because I didn't want my kids to go. On this particular day, we ate lunch and I got my shoes on to head out of the door before everyone else was done. My older boy asked where I was going. To my great surprise, he said, "Dad, I want to go!" Why would I say no to that? He finished up his lunch and got his shoes on.

And we were off.

I thought that I was going to be a kid watcher and not a super mover, but I was ok with that. On the way down, when my boy told me it was a "good day for ice cream," I just thought he was trying to sneak in a plug for a sugary treat. I wanted to say no, but first asked him why. "Because we always get ice cream after service!"

Wow.

Awesome.

And that's my story. Well, there is more. I have to say how complimentary everyone was of his hard work. He kept picking up big stuff and actually carrying it without tipping over or dropping anything. We even carried out a coffee table that really belonged to the apartment. Even though it was really heavy for him, he helped me in a big way. However, when we found out that it had to go back he didn't think he could handle it so I carried it back myself. It was really funny. And he did a really great job.

I believe that when we are in the service of our fellow beings, we are only in the service of our God (Mosiah 2:17).

Does anyone have a service experience that they want to share? or a gospel lesson that kids have learned and repeated back to you?