Month: October 2008

To the Mothers in Zion: Have Weekly Home Evenings

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This is part five of my ongoing feature of President Benson’s address to mothers.

Have Weekly Home Evenings. Fifth, take time to have a meaningful weekly home evening. With your husband presiding, participate in a spiritual and an uplifting home evening each week. Have your children actively involved. Teach them correct principles. Make this one of your great family traditions. Remember the marvelous promise made by President Joseph F. Smith when home evenings were first introduced to the Church: “If the Saints obey this counsel, we promise that great blessings will result. Love at home and obedience to parents will increase. Faith will be developed in the hearts of the youth of Israel, and they will gain power to combat the evil influence and temptations which beset them” (in James R. Clark, comp., Messages of the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 6 vols. [1965–75], 4:339). This wonderful promise is still in effect today.

Ezra Taft Benson, To the Mothers in Zion, address given at a fireside for parents, 22 February 1987.

General Conference Activity Packets

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Our family is enjoying General Conference this weekend. What a blessing it is to be able to hear the inspired words of a living prophet and living apostles.

To keep things a little more calm and focused on Conference and things of the Spirit, I put together a packet of activities for the Ant Bug to do during the sessions. Thanks to Sugardoodle.net, I had a wealth of resources available to select from.


Sugardoodle.net is the LDS woman’s dream website (especially if you have children or a calling in the Primary or Nursery or Young Women or Enrichment Committee or…). Basically it is an online file folder of any kind of helpful LDS resource you can imagine, with countless contributors. You can find me visiting the site every few days.

If you’re looking for General Conference packets and resources to use with your children, I saw somewhere around 9 or 10 different links posted in the last two weeks. Just start working your way down the list on the first page and you’ll find them.

My favorites are the Apostle Cards, and the General Conference Coloring Book. The Ultimate General Conference Packet looks excellent also, but some of the activities are a little beyond the reach of my nearly four year old. But the Friend Coloring Book will be making an appearance in our home on a Sabbath day soon to come.

To all the wonderful contributors on Sugardoodle.net, thanks so much for sharing your work and ideas with us!

Looking for a good book?

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I love to read books with my children. Our bedtime routine always includes at least one story, sometimes three. Some of our recent book favorites I have shared here. We make regular trips to the library (every 1-2 weeks), and I am constantly on the lookout for great new books to share with my daughters.

One of the tools I have been using lately to find good books is the Read Aloud America Book List. The list makes it easy to find great books appropriate at every age level. One recommendation we enjoyed was Giraffes Can’t Dance, by Giles Andreae.

You can also find some great reads among the Caldecott Medal Winners and Honor Books. An oldie but goodie is Make Way for Ducklings, by Robert McCloskey. It won the award in 1942, and is a favorite on our library check out list.

So, what childrens books are you reading?