Vet school open house and General Conference

We have friends that go to or work at the Vet school on campus and we've heard a lot about it... including that its a really good vet school. They have an open house every year that sounds so fun and this year we went for a few hours on Saturday before the first session of General Conference. The buildings are big and the classrooms seemed so nice. Its like a university meets a farm, but heavier on the university side.... which I guess is exactly what a vet school was so i'm not sure what I was expecting.  We saw a cow painted  with where internal organs are and it even have a hole with access to the stomach permanently in its side. Which sounds painful and gross, but didn't seem to bother him at all. I guess its really useful for research harvesting enzymes to help other cows? Not sure I understand it correctly. 

Then we saw an animal show where some dogs and cats were dressed up like dinosaurs because the theme was 'Jurassic Bark'. They brought out a snack and a tarantula too and we could hold and pet the animals after the show. We totally didn't even stick around to see the tarantula up close... seeing it on stage was close enough for me! Then they had some stations set up in the hallway where the kids could put on lab coats and 'dissect' a dinosaur, or dig for animal bones in a sandbox, etc.  They had an agility dog show course set up outside and we watched some dogs do that from little tiny ones to big ones. That was pretty cool. Then Chris had to go set up for General Conference at the church so I stuck around a bit more with the kids to visit the petting zoo and see the skeletons.

Even though I tried to have everything set up for Conference before we left, it was still too crazy for my preference during the first speaker, but thanks to the Missionaries for being willing to stay at the church during the session, Chris was able to come home and watch the sessions with us at home. So nice. This year I didn't do much prep and I tried to stay away from anything that made me have to hand out stuff mid-talks. We had a 10 or so brown paper bags with a new snack or activity (like beads and string, stickers, stencils) that we could open 1 up after every other talk or so.  This worked well for the first two sessions, but I needed to find something different for the second day to keep the kids engaged. I'm trying to find the balance between simplifying and encouraging kids to listen... and trying to focus myself on listening.  Not sure I found it yet. 

I loved soo many of the talks and kept thinking, 'oh, this will be a good one to study!' I really learn the best when I can read the words and write about applying them.  Elder Holland totally had me in tears at the end as I felt both so happy with having basked in spiritual light for so much of the weekend, but also a bit overwhelmed with ways I can do better, with the crazy state of the house, and with the amount of junk I ate, I really wasn't looking forward to Monday.. when I have to clean up/recover and actually change habits. I love thinking about and planning to be better but actually making the changes is hard. This time Chris and I are reinstating (its been YEARS AND YEARS since this was regular) our couple morning and nightly prayers, -- my favorite thing about this one is that it was Chris' idea, and mainly his efforts that are making it happen(!). Personally, I'm going to try and not waste so much time on things that don't matter, like following social media multiple times a day and watching TV shows at night. Its not going to be 'fun' but I will feel so much better and maybe not have so many 'blah' feelings about life.