Train up a chid in the way he should go

This past weekend was busy around these parts. The first weekend in October brought us General Conference and - much to the chagrin of LDS Longhorn and Sooner fans - the annual OU/Texas football game. Being the pious types that we are, we taped the game and watched it after we enjoyed the Saturday sessions of conference - and didn't even sneak peeks to see what the score was. That takes an amazing amount of willpower, my friends.

Thomas had spent the morning absorbing the messages at conference (yeah, right), so we thought it would be good to balance out the spiritual knowledge that he had recently gleaned with a little secular football knowledge. Here he is, showing off his mad verbal skills:

(A little background on the video - "banzai" is Japanese for "hurrah!". It's something that (I guess?) Japanese people say to their kids, so they'll lift their arms up. It helps when you're changing clothes. Anyway, Thomas recently learned how to say it and is now always asking me to take his shirt off. Which I don't do.)



So there you have it. Our kid is a genius. And he got to experience, for the first time in his young life, the sweet taste of victory over the evil Texas Longhorns.

Lest you think we only watched football with Thomas on Saturday, he did watch Conference with us and pointed out every Jesus he saw on the computer screen. But mostly he just drove his cars around the living room floor. Lucky for us, he loves naps and cars. They kept him pretty well occupied while we watched Conference, so we actually got more out of it than we thought we would (parents of small children everywhere know what I'm talking about). Does that mean I have a notebook full of profound Conference quotes and insight that I gained while listening to the messages? Uh...I wish.

Unfortunately, there are lots of doodles of hearts,flowers and my name spelled in about a million different fonts (block letters, cursive, all caps, all lower case - you get the point). There are even some words in my actual notes that are only halfway spelled with the word ending in a crooked line (written as I dozed off and my hand slid off the page). So, I'm not the most alert Conference watcher. I couldn't tell you a lot of what was said. But I can tell you what I remember most - the most GORGEOUS arrangement of "Dear to the Heart of the Shepherd". So beautiful.

Since I don't remember a lot of the specifics of Conference, I've decided to choose one talk a week to focus on and study in depth. I'll double up with the shorter talks some weeks, and by the next Conference in April, hopefully I will have been able to internalize a little bit more.

In short: 8 hours of church (10 for Kenta)+ 1 Sooner victory + 1 new, useful word learned by Thomas = an exciting weekend!