I enjoyed General Conference, although it is always a challenge to focus with a baby and many children. I got the idea a while ago from my girlfriend Becky Williams to take notes on Conference right in my journal. I was so impressed once when I asked her a question about somebody’s talk from General Conference. She went right to her journal and told me exactly what the speaker said. This was before the days when every talk was archived at lds.org. So ever since I’ve been taking notes, especially any epiphanies I have as I listen, something I learned from Oliver DeMille. He said that whenever you go to a class or seminar, draw a line down the center of the page and write notes of what the speaker says on one side of the line, and the ideas you hear whispering in your head about what you want to do or are feeling on the other side.

I don’t worry about taking copious notes and catching everything, but even jotting down short notes and my epiphanies can be hard with my baby. He seems to be the neediest and least interested in toys when I am wanting to take notes. There must be some kind of Murphy’s law about that.  The other challenge is staying awake, once I am nursing and that oxytocin kicks in and I am listening to some of those gentle, sonorous-sounding speakers.

The talk that hit me the most was President Monson’s Sunday morning talk about temples. The story he told of the family whose father and brothers worked 3000 miles away in the nickel mines for four years to earn enough money for the whole family to travel to a temple in New Zealand was so inspiring and heart-wrenching. It just makes me wonder if my family would be so dedicated to getting temple ordinances if they were hard to obtain. It makes me all the more desirous of sacrificing to help my deceased relatives get their temple ordinances.

I enjoyed the Young Women’s conference as well the week before. The theme was the 13th Article of Faith. The phrase “we believe…in doing good to all men” really struck me. That’s some thing for me to be better at. To do good to all men, not just the ones who I like or who are nice to me. I’ve never thought about those words before.

I went to a cooking class that I enjoyed done by my friend Tammie Duggar about dips, dressings, and sauces. You can check out her blog here http:///nourishingfamilies.blogspot.com/. She has some recipes up right now about how to beat sugar cravings. She has written a cookbook called Scratch which features cooking dishes made from scratch, which has become a lost art Tammie was my savior who stepped in to drive her daughter and my son and their Williamsburg classmates from Davis county Utah to their outdoor adventure camp in southern Utah last fall. Tammie and her family are part of the Commonwealth School, based on TJEd, that my older children attend once a week. They were recently featured on the Mormon Channel. Tammie’s husband, Dr. Jerry Duggar, is a chiropractor who teaches how to be well. Listen here http://radio.lds.org/programs/insights-episode-16?lang=eng .

The weather has been so on and off with snow, rain, and sunshine. I think we are all impatient for spring to finally be here with warm, go-without-a-jacket-or-coat weather. It reminds me of how the seasons change in our lives. When we go from a figurative winter to a figurative spring, rarely are the edges cut and dried. The same as when our children wean or develop a new skill. Usually there are a few steps forward and then backwards. Remembering that helps me to be more patient. After all, when I make changes, I usually don’t do a new thing perfectly all at once. Why should I expect nature to instantly change from one way (stormy and wintry) to another way (sunshiny and springy) with no backsliding?

I am excited for Easter. This year I am remembering that one of the Easter activities recommended in the Hales’ book about Easter, A Christ-centered Easter, from Deseret Book, is to dejunk your home, akin to the cleansing of the temple that Christ performed in the week before his death and resurrection. I am grateful that I am remebering this now, because it takes more than just a day for more. Dejunking seems like a continual process here. I have inherited my parents’ packrat tendencies. (At a family lunch at my sister’s home over a month ago my mom approached me with long-lost treasures to sort through: almost every bit of piano music my four siblings and I had accumulated as well as a box of barettes, Smurf bobby pins and hair ornaments from the early 80s. Yikes! I had to resist the urge to run the other way.)  I’ve also passed them on to my children.

I definitely want to focus intensely on it the next few weeks before Easter. I would love to feel like all the rooms in my home are blog photo worthy. What a miracle if that could happen. Let’s just say that if I had waited to start homeschooling my oldest (now 17) when he was five until my house was super clean and organized it would never have happened. Things don’t have to be perfect to start homeschooling.

I finished reading Oliver DeMille’s new book The Student Whisperer that I got at the TJEd Forum. It is a fascinating book. I read it while nursing and I couldn’t do the writing exercises while nursing. I am going to set aside a block of time to write in my new Student Whisperer journal. Oliver and Tiffany Earl, the coauthor, write about how important it is to listen to the voices whispering in your mind. Some of the voices are evil. Some are good, namely, the Real You, and the Inspirer. I think these are code words for your conscience or the Light of Christ. I really like the guidelines they give for how to tell the difference between the evil voices that we all hear in our minds and the good voices.

I also recently finished  two books by John Pontius, The Spirit of Fire and Angels Among Us. They are so inspiring and total page-turners. They are novels based on the ideas in John’s first book, Following the Light of Christ into His Presence. I am just starting the latter. It is about how to feast on the fruit of the tree of life. The tree of life symbolizes the love of God, and that’s something we can experience daily, happily, in this life, not in some distant heaven. The basic idea is to be committed to following the whisperings of your conscience and the Holy Spirit, and you will be happy, because you will be following the iron rod (the word of God, the words He speaks to you), and these words will lead you to the Tree of Life. The  fruit of the Tree of Life is the sweetest and that which makes us most happy.

I am wondering if Oliver got some of his ideas for listening to voices from John’s books.Specifically, the idea that you can tell if you are listening to the right voice by how you feel. If you feel anxious and stressed, then you can be sure that you are listening to the wrong voice.

I also just finished The Soft Reply. It’s about the power of responding to people, especially angry people, with a soft response. That’s something I’ve been really working on with my children. My mother was very good at responding to people gently, I don’t ever remember her raising her voice. I have not inherited her incredible patience and have been working on my patience ever since I became a mother.