camera, conference and kids...oh, my!

I know, I am a slacker. But I am a busy slacker of sorts. This weekend was jam packed with inspirational conference sessions, soccer games a plenty (3, to be exact), soccer pictures, a mother/daughter dinner and a birthday party.

Yep. It was so busy that I had to work hard to find time to play with my new camera. (Isn't that awful? Large camera purchases should be followed by leisurely weekends that allow for plenty of time to experiment.) My camera's name? Papa Bear. My old camera was going to be baby wee bear, but Autumn has made me name it mama bear instead. Mama bear is being loaned out to Autumn for her photography adventures, completely dependent on her treatment (or abuse) of Mama. At the beginning of the school year, I asked Autumn to choose a subject she would like to add to our school day and she chose photography. We're going to work on her shooting in manual today. So far, she knows that she likes to shoot wide open as she loves fuzzy backgrounds and she gets the correlation between shutter speed and aperture. Go, Autumn!

On a conference note, I loved it. The only part I heard of Saturday's morning session was a little tender mercy of its own. It came as I was walking the halls with Lilly after she had *intentionally* dumped her kix all over the chapel and had screamed at the top of her lungs. Elder Bednar talked about some of his fond memories of craziness when trying to carry on righteous traditions with his children. (you know, crying kids, dumping kix all over the chapel sort of thing) He compared all of the lessons we teach our kids to brush strokes in a painting that might not seem to amount to much at the time, but how they are all integral to the final masterpiece. We wised up on Sunday and had Chris take the older girls to the 1st session while I took the older girls to the 2nd. It was great to actually get to take notes in the 2nd session and I am going to try my darndest to listen the rest of it again this week to take the rest of my notes. Notes have a way of solidifying things in my mushy little brain. See? Busy weekend.