I've been described as a Hobbit and I've come to embrace the idea - I love good food, parties, a comfy home and family. However I would probably be of the Took family line since I do like adventure also. Share in my creative adventures and remember "Not all who wander are lost."
It's 11pm Saturday night and I'm up. Not only am I up but I'm making a blog post! :p
So why am I doing this? Today and tomorrow is General Conference, a special time every 6 months in my church where we get to listen to our Prophet and other leaders...for 8 hours at home, on the TV or over the radio or on the computer, etc. etc. It may seem daunting and extreme but it can be very spiritually enlightening also. Feel free to follow this link and check it out for yourself/learn more!
While this can be a lot easier than trying to convince my kids to get into nice clothes and go to church and sit still in front of everyone else and go to class without me, it can still be a struggle to get them to be quiet enough for me to listen and for them to gain something, anything, out of the conference for themselves. True it's done in 2 hour spurts but 8 hours is A LOT of time for kids to listen to adults talking, and talking, and talking. And so it is that each conference I find myself (almost always the night before) scrounging around for activities and things for my kids to do that will 1. keep them quieter (a 6 year old and a 4 year old will not be "quiet" unless you say to them "be noisy" like today in between conference sessions when I asked them to go outside and be loud and noisy and that's when they decided to sit quietly, LOL) and 2. tie them in to conference in some way
Thankfully there's tons of resources out there - one has just to put "conference packet" or "general conference kids" in google or pinterest and a plethora of stuff comes up. I have found with my kids that some of the stuff shared works great and some of it doesn't really work at all. My 6 year old daughter will color but my boy... not so much. Honestly he's not into much of anything that requires sitting still. So I pick a bit here and there, print off a few pages from this packet, another from this other blog. Today I found a great activity for my boy - shaped scissors (the ones for scrapbooking and crafts and such) a stack of paper and a bowl - I had him cut the paper into the bowl (to help the mess be somewhat contained) and he was as happy as a clam sitting and trying out all the many scissors I have.
But the main reason I'm making this post is 6 months ago I found a really great idea that BOTH of my kids really loved - Poke Pages! I got the idea from moms have questions too. Basically, you have a large letter that the kids can poke with a thumbtack, needle, sharp pencil, whatever you're comfortable with them using kind of thing. You lay the paper on the floor and let them poke away. My boy especially LOVED these! So naturally I remembered them and wanted to do more - but the other blog only had a few pages, so I made some of my own! And I really wanted to share because I know for me it's been so nice to have multiple options and ideas - especially since in my experience you prepare tons and tons and tons of activities so the kids will be occupied for a good long time and they do everything in the first 20 minutes and then - panic! what to do now? Hence I am up late the night before printing of a good stack of activity pages and making poke pages and then sharing them on my blog. (first time sharing a PDF so we'll see if it works) So I hope you enjoy and to all the people who will be watching conference with little kids - I wish you Good Luck!
P.S. I'm including some of my favorite places to get conference packets, coloring pages, etc. etc. at the very bottom too!
Some of my favorite sources for conference activities:
Conference packets (they've made a few over the years and I pull from different years and from nursery and primary, but they also have some for older kids and even adults!) www.sugardoodle.net
Amazing coloring pages (and not just for conference) - http://ldscoloringbook.com/coloring-pages/
Armor of God coloring page for girls! - practicalpages
Stick puzzle (this idea is for a church bag, and any of those kind of things can be great to pull out for conference, but these are really fun) - blog.bitsofeverything.com
Conference Trains (did these last time and kids really liked it)- katiesblogness
To me a Quest is something you work really hard on, putting all your time and thought into it until you've achieved and finished it to the end. So in some ways it wasn't the best word to use as I haven't been able to put all my time and energy into it but the word Quest also brings up images of adventure and excitement, exploring into the unknown, something noble, something great! One of my Quests deals with family history. It's intriguing to hear stories and learn about your ancestors and it can really help you to feel like you know who you are and have a sense of who you came from. It can be really great to learn about the cultures of your ancestors. I knew from when I was really little that my great-grandpa had come to the U.S. from Germany so I always loved to learn about German culture and customs. I know a lot about my Dad's side of the family, at least more than my Mom's.
It was probably about 10 years ago that I started getting more involved with figuring out my Mom's family history. My Mom's Dad, Lendon Hicks, passed away in 1999. I didn't know him terribly well, we had spent time with him but we had always lived very far away from each other. I had this desire to learn more about him and his family. Little did I know what I was getting myself into - a fun and exciting but also very time consuming and often frustrating um, well - Quest.
My grandpa Len holding me as a wee little baby
I was in college and took some classes about doing Genealogy and the school had these great resources including, at the time, free access to Ancestry.com files. I dived in and often would find out after hours of putting in data that there was a quicker and easier way to do it, hence some of the frustration. Family History is one of those things that can really suck you in, it's a time warp where you can go four hours and you suddenly pull out of it and go, "hey, maybe I should get some food before the day is over." One of the problems with Family History is there isn't a definitive end to it. True you can get to a point going up the family tree where you can't get more information. A friend of mine was doing her family and got to Elly the barmaid, daughter of Elly the barmaid - yep not going to really be able to go past that (although I do believe that was getting back into like the 1600s). But for me I wanted to figure out about siblings and such, not just the one straight line back. Feeling that way however can make it so Family History becomes this crazy labyrinth and you find yourself going off on this tangent path and winding and twisting all up when you realize you probably have gone a bit far off from your original path so you go back and try to flesh that path out more.
For most people when you're starting off Family History you talk to - well - family. My Mom's family has never been that close though, living far apart and living their own lives. We didn't get together for holidays or have reunions. Right after I got married in 2004, I went with my Mom and sister to Kentucky and it was like this little mini reunion as we visited with her sister and brother who hadn't been all together like that for probably 10 years. (Now mind you, there's 11 or so kids in the family but most of them are half siblings and step siblings to my mom, she has just the two, I guess you'd call them full blooded siblings, but she had a bit of a relationship with some of the other siblings also. I didn't really know there were so many siblings until just recently actually) But I just wasn't all that close to my Mom's relatives so I didn't feel like I could call them up and ask about the family. Plus after Mom's accident I couldn't really go to her for information.
I took what info I did have and just went for the Censuses and government records. I was really getting the hang of things, how to look stuff up online and gathering all sorts of census stuff - but then I had my daughter and it's not very easy to go to a Genealogy library with a baby. I realized being a mom of young kids I needed to set aside Family History for another time when I could do it more. This wasn't easy as there was a draw to keep finding more but I had to keep saying to myself that whole idea of there being a time and season to everything. Yet every now and then something calls be back to it and I'll once again get sucked into it for a time before I set it aside - the Quest calls to me.
Wow, long post and I haven't even once mentioned the whole Cherokee thing. I'm sure someone's going to read a bit into it and wonder why the title is Cherokee Quest. Well let me get to that right now. In looking up family stuff on my Mom's side, I had heard that some of the ancestors might be Native American. I thought this was really cool since I've always liked the culture of the Native Americans - I've been drawn to the art, music, etc. and on my bedroom wall is a collection of dreamcatchers, medicine pouches and other such Native American iconographic objects that both my husband and I have collected/made over the years. (My husband doesn't have any Native American ancestors but he got attracted to the Native American culture through Order of the Arrow Boy Scout program) It seemed rational enough for my ancestors to be Native, at least in my eyes my great-grandparents had Native features, but I only had 2 pictures and a newspaper clipping to go off of and I only remember meeting them in person once.
Carlo and Edna Hicks1990
I had heard that my great-grandpa Carlo's mother was Native American but when I found her in the census she was put down as White so I didn't think much more of it. I did keep searching for more history and at one point decided to share all the census and marriage licenses and such on facebook for anyone interested. I suddenly got friend request from relatives I didn't know and went to look something up online and found this great site that had a lot more information and even some pictures of some of my ancestors! Carlos mother, Minnie Hicks, was in that group with a few pictures and in looking up a little more online I found more pictures of her - once again to me it looked like Native American features.
I added that into my information and posted more on facebook and one of my mothers cousins told me that it's specifially the Cherokee tribe that Minnie is said to belong to as well as some of Edna's ancestors and there's a good chance we are related to the current Principal Chief Michell Hicks of the Eastern Band of Cherokee, but the only connection is the last name Hicks.
In looking up on my great-grandmother Edna's line, her grandmother Elizabeth Carmack was also said to be Cherokee. One of Edna's nephews put that idea out on a forum and recently I found her father Rev. Jacob Carmack's gravestone was put up and the idea of him being Cherokee was put on a forum also. What I find interesting is the information about Jacob didn't have his daughter Elizabeth so it's more than one source. Plus, as I've searched for more information about Minnie, I've discovered that "Minnie" is a common Cherokee name (or at least I found a variety of other Minnie's that are proven Cherokee).
In case I've lost you and this is all confusing here's a pedigree outline:
Overview - Lendon is my mom's dad. The surname Hicks, is a Cherokee name, there's a fair amount of Hicks in this list of Cherokees. (There's even more Fields in that list, which may be related to Edna, some of the names in that list match the Fields names I found here but sadly the years don't match.) The circled people, Minnie, Elizabeth and Jacob, are said to be Cherokee.
Sigh. There are some great websites but to view the information you almost always have to pay a lot of money. And once again there's the whole issue of time, a lot of this takes tons of time which as I said before is not something I have a lot of right now. So I'm not sure how to go about things and if I'll ever be able to fulfill my Quest. But perhaps posting all this here will help. If you're reading this and want to see more information - the Census and other records, you can check out my facebook album.
A little over a year ago I was a Primary teacher in my church. When the Bishop and his Councilors gave me and my husband the call I was actually rather stunned and I don't remember exactly what I said but it was something along the lines of "Have you seen my husband?" since he's not really the super kid friendly image, don't get me wrong, he's a wonderful dad and all and he's great with teenagers but when I was a Nursery teacher (over the 18 month olds to the 3 year olds) I had him come help me one day and he literally stood there for most of the time having no idea what to do being surrounded by small children. Before I could question further though, one of the Councilors brought up how it was a class of all boys around 6-7 years old, and some of them were a bit um, hard to handle. It all became clear then as my husband worked at a boys home and got his first bachelor degree in recreational management and youth program and knew a lot about how to handle rougher kids.
Yep, my husband became the Primary bouncer. :) He does have a slightly Harley Davidson look to him since he is 6'2" and has long blonde hair and a mustache and goatee. And yes it was a rough class - I would come home from church exhausted. I have kids, and my boy is quite the handful himself. The biggest issue with this class was there was more than one hard to handle kid and they were hard to handle in different ways. We had a very aggressive boy who acted up constantly so most of the time Ian held him on his lap while the boy scratched his arms up. There were a few times I tried to hold him - boy was that crazy; got some nice bruises that day. Then there was a boy who was passive aggressive. If he acted up to the point I had to put him on my lap, he would become as limp as a rag doll and just kind of lay there not caring. There was a boy that was so fun, we'd ask a question about God or the scriptures and he'd raise his hand and give an answer like "Did you know you can tell a Whales age by his earwax?" Or he'd talk about dinosaurs since he knew all sorts of official names and such. We also had a boy that didn't talk. He had a literal condition where he couldn't talk to anyone besides family and a few friends. Happily he overcame that and talks a lot more to everyone now but it was a very interesting mix indeed.
Despite the craziness of it all, I did become attached to the boys and it's nice seeing them in the halls every now and then and some of them seem to still like me. Really they are all great boys, it was just combining them all (I hear the voice of Captain Planet in my head, "By our powers combined" LOL) and trying to get them to sit still quietly through sharing time and then sit for a lesson in a teeny tiny room was not the easiest task in the world. The really interesting thing too is it seemed to be the perfect thing to have us be their teacher - when it came time for the Primary program where the kids are all up front during the main sacrament meeting (that's 1 hour and 15 minutes sitting away from their parents, up in front for all to see, and in these lovely rocky squeaky chairs too) our class was the most well behaved. Other classes had kids rocking their chairs a bunch or talking or poking each other. Our boys all sat like angels. Sure they didn't really sing - we told them that was fine, just to move their mouths to look like they sang - but they did their parts and were really great. It probably was also due to my husband promising to give them a whole candy bar if they were good - yes bribery works some times ;)
So how does this all tie in to the paper CTR rings? Some of you may even be wondering what a CTR ring is in the first place - long story short, it stands for Choose The Right and to learn more about my religion you can go here. For the Primary classes, there are manuals with lessons in them. One of the lessons I was preparing for our rambunctious boys talked about the kids having a CTR ring. I thought about this and how 1. we didn't really have the funds to get all the boys a ring, 2. a small thing like that is pretty easy for a young kid to loose and 3. wouldn't it be nice to have something we could use for the lesson that wouldn't be expensive and would be ok if it got lost or broken or if the kids didn't really care for it after 10 minutes?
And so - I created a paper CTR ring! Quick and easy, kid size, colorable, cheap, and no big worry about the kids loosing them/taking good care of them the way you would with a ring you bought. Without further adieu and rambling, here are the templates and pictures of how to assemble the rings - this is one of the few post that I do kind of hope people share and freely enjoy.
Print out your ring. It's best to print it on thicker paper such as cardstock but it also works on plain paper. Cut out all around and then cut where there's the dark line - but DON'T cut all the way through. You can see in the picture above how it's only cut half way where the dark line ends.
This next part is a little tricky, I hope my explanation and the pictures come out clear enough for you to understand. You want to twist the paper around so the two halves of the CTR shield are close to each other and so the slits you cut are next to each other and then the two halves should slide together.
Here you can see the two halves starting to slide together.
Here's a closeup of the intersection.
Here's a closeup of the inside. I put a piece of scotch tape on the inside where the two sides meet to help hold it all together. You can also put tape on the front if it's not sitting the way you want.
As you can see, they come out a bit small four adult fingers, but they work great for little fingers.
Perfect! The kids really loved them and they fit their little fingers really nicely. The kids also liked being able to color them with whatever colors they wanted.
This is a whole sheet of them - I was able to fit 7 to a sheet. I hope you can copy and print this image ok and have it come through clearly. I can't figure out a way to attach a pdf of it so it's to the right proportion and all. But if nothing else you can copy that first image which is only one ring but it's nice and big so it should come through clearly.
