Conference at Home

Hello All!

We are having General Conference at home. Emily tells me Conference is carried by CBS out here. We're getting it on BYUTV. Between sessions, AJ and Nikki and their kids are supposed to come visit us. They may stay for a session, they may stay for dinner - they weren't sure. Grandpa Verl tells me AJ takes the kids to church when Nikki has to work on Sundays, so that's something to be grateful for.

We are doing really well. I don't have to be gone as much as I did in Graduate School. Emily has a regular friend she goes walking with every other morning or so and has several other friends in the ward here who she goes to book club (two book clubs, actually) and several other various activities together. She trades off having "preschool" with several other mothers once a week for Nathan and some other boys his age. Nathan loves it. Matthew is learning to speak - yesterday he was trying to say "Skittles!" so we'd give him a piece of candy. It was cute. He gets hugely excited when something he likes is going to happen - like bath time, reading a book, or dessert. His eyes get huge and his mouth drops open and he jumps up and down with excitement. Sort of like Emily does whenever I come home :). Oh, that's another one -- he does that when daddy comes home and runs over for a big hug, which makes me feel pretty special. He has this thing down now where he puts his arms out wide and runs to tackle-hug mommy whenever she gets down to his level and smiles at him. That's awfully cute.

Back to Hayley and Nathan - Hayley has been reading a lot. Whenever there's no other specific activity going on or whenever Nathan and Matthew aren't playing with her, you can find her sitting in her room, the library, or one of the couches downstairs quietly turning the pages of a book. She has read a ton of books for her age (in my opinion), and shows no sign of slowing down. Here's a link to her bookworm we made for her room. Nathan likes to play with his toy trains and he actually is the one asking me if we can read from the Book of Mormon a lot lately. We used to read the picture book, Book of Mormon Stories, to them, but lately we're just going through the actual Book of Mormon and stopping to describe the stories. We're also reading The Chronicles of Narnia. We read the Friend Magazine articles and Doctrine and Covenants Stories -- and last night we started reading a book called "The Story of the World" - a four volume set which overviews all of known history in kid language. So we learned, last night, about nomad tribes who made lizard stew and the Egyptians that lived next to the annually-flooding Nile River in Africa.

I have to post this because I hear Conference getting started down stairs. Maybe I'll post a more thorough update tonight - hopefully I'll have pictures of our latest trip to the Boise Zoo (I was at work, but Emily took pictures with the kids).

- David Ridley