Conference Fort

Somewhere in the Bloggernacle (I wish I could remember where) I stumbled across a fun idea for watching General Conference with little children, and we were excited to try it out with Bug this time.

Remember that good King Benjamin from The Book of Mormon? He's a personal favorite of mine, actually. Remember the tower he built? The people came from all around and set up their tents facing the tower so they could hear his words.

We had a quick family home evening lesson with the Buggy girl about this story, (I wish I would have seen the cool pictures and summary for children on the link above before I decided to just sort of wing it) and then built our own tents in the living room out of blankets. Turns out that blanket fort building skills decline with age and lack of practice, and Schmoopsie and I quickly found that the average 10 year old could probably whip up a decent blanket fort in half the time it took us. After a few failures and careful consideration of our architectural plans, we employed the use of a vaccuum as center pole. It all came together fairly well after that.

Once it was done, there was plenty of room in there for Daddy, Bug, the computer streaming the session online, and yes, even pregnant Mommy to sprawl out uncomfortably on the floor.

Bug held still like that for, oh, about 4 seconds. At nearly two years old, it's not surprising that the concept of relaxing and listening quietly was completely lost on her. In fact, I'm sure the entire adventure was simply a messy change from the norm for her rather than the cool scriptural object lesson it was intended to be, but we still thought it was a fun tradition to start early.

We decided that during the next General Conference in April, we'll have to hide Sherman underneath the safety of one of the wooden kitchen chairs to protect him/her from the hopping feet of the toddler and inevitable blanket collapse that quickly follows.

What are other fun traditions for General Conference? Our family also loves to stuff our faces with a breakfast of ridiculous proportions in between the morning and afternoon sessions on Saturday, and the girls enjoy a shopping trip while the boys check out the priesthood session Saturday night. What do you do?