Enjoying October – General Conference and Playing Outside

Last weekend we enjoyed watching our church’s General Conference, which is a semiannual meeting when general authorities and other church leaders speak about topics like faith, forgiveness, having a testimony, the Atonement of Jesus Christ, the Book of Mormon, etc. I’m so glad that today’s technology makes it possible to watch conference at home, online (it’s also in our area on a satellite channel, but we just have cable).

Eli surprised us by being really excited to watch conference. He knows and recognizes our prophet, Thomas S. Monson, and he also really likes watching the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sing during conference. Eli sat on Ben’s lap for quite a while, listening and watching.

And of course at one point, Charlie had to crawl over and see what this was all about, which really bugged Eli…

“No Charlie! NOOOOOOOOOOOO….”

I love that we have one child who is adamant about his personal space (Eli), and another who likes to be right there with you (Charlie) and gets up close.

So I took Charlie and Eli was back to sitting in Ben’s lap.

On a side note, I scored this desk at a garage sale a few weeks ago for a really cheap price. I wish we didn’t have such a beast of a printer, but I love having all of the storage, especially the file drawer on the bottom. The desk didn’t fit in our car, but we lived really close so the family offered to help drive it over to our place. The bottom part of the desk fit, but the hutch didn’t, so Ben and the other guy ended up pushing the hutch about 5 blocks on a furniture dolly to get it over here. It was worth it though – I think it’s perfect for the space (and HUGE improvement over our cheap Kmart desk that we bought nine years ago while at BYU).

And the rest of the photos in this post are of the kids outside, enjoying our brisk fall weather.

I couldn’t believe that I was able to convince Eli to let Charlie sit there in his lap for these pictures…

Charlie’s vest is size 3-6 months and barely fits around his belly, but I still think it’s cute :)

There’s a spot in our front yard that has a shallow hole/divet in the ground. Eli kept running over to it and calling it his “potty.” Okay, whatever you say…?

Charlie is a big fan of eating sticks:

See you mom…

Then later in the day, when Ben came home from work, we played outside a little more before it got too dark.

And finally, some pictures from playgroup at the park this week:

After playgroup, we came home and found Eli’s favorite neighborhood cat on our back deck:

We had crazy strong winds the night before, so there were lots of branches and leaves down everywhere.

My big guy… this week he stopped calling me “Mama” and says “Mom! Mom! Mom!” nonstop (I was a little sad about this). He also asks me WHY all the time. I feel like we’ve entered a new phase of toddler!