General Conference

Please don’t judge us wrongly, but we totally forgot about Conference on Saturday. We just completely spaced it…until I magically got online and saw on Facebook that my friend Katie McCue was excited about the announcement of a temple in Calgary. I was like, “Weird that they announced that today…they usually do that during General Confer…oh…yeah…that…”

We’ll chock it up to the weekday confusion we suffer from.

So, we’re definitely excited about all the temples that were announced, but especially so for the Calgary and Rome temples. That’s about all we learned about either of the Saturday sessions. We’ll have to wait until we have internet to watch them, I guess.

But we did get to see the Sunday sessions. We went over to the Lewis’s apartment for the first session and joined them for their traditional conference breakfast, even though we had it at 6:00 PM. Orange rolls, real bacon, and eggs! So good! I tried to pay attention to conference, and I think I ended up getting about as much out of it as I get out of sacrament meeting, which is little to nothing. I was too busy worrying about Rachel peeing her pants or coloring on the wall/floor/couch or fighting with Sam and Megan to really focus on the meeting.

I guess I’ll just read the talks later…with the Saturday sessions…

It was fun, though. We always like spending time with the Lewises. They remind us what big families are like. Sometimes we forget since our family is so small. Megan pointed that out to me on Sunday, actually.

“Your family is so small you all fit on one couch,” she said.

We are a small family, it’s true. But I think we’re technically a “young” family, not a “small” family since we’re still a work in progress.

After conference we ran home to get our dessert for our late-night-conference-watching dessert-potluck. We went over rather early so that we could get Rachel settled down in Finn’s playpen before the last session of conference started. She always has a little trouble falling asleep at the Mason’s. We had a guitar hero showdown a few nights ago and she screamed forever…tonight, though, she fell asleep around 9:30, so we were able to watch conference in peace.

We found that the person giving opening prayer was a little emotional. He opened the prayer and choked out a few words and then paused. We all waited in silence for him to continue praying. After a few minutes we all started peeking through our eyes and kind of snickering.

The video wasn’t streaming right and the picture had frozen. We kind of laughed about it and decided to dig into the desserts while we waited for the video to start again. It didn’t ever start working properly again, though, so we sat through General Conference Mad Libs for the first few talks. The streaming would freeze up every few seconds and then jump ahead and then freeze and then jump.

What we heard was something like this,

“My dear brothers and…families are essential to…my own mother…with priesthood hold…in Isaiah we find…and therefore we…”

And then all of a sudden a new speaker would be on the stand and we’d have no idea what was going on.

Eventually we decided to switch to just an audio feed and found ourselves flung into the intermediate hymn. And here we thought we were just on the second talk.

So I really only listened to the last half of the last session of General Conference. I especially enjoyed Elder Cook’s talk, as well as President Monson’s, although I’d have to read them again to tell you what I liked about them. Keep in mind that we were pushing midnight by this point.

There’s something special about watching General Conference. It makes me feel like I’m really participating, even if I’m not there and I don’t get a whole lot out of it. I suppose that’s why they print it in the Ensign the next month, so that you can watch it and feel good in October and then read it in November and be like, “Oh, that’s what he was saying when the kids were screaming/the internet was blacking out/I was zoned out because it was midnight,” and actually get some spiritual substance.