conference weekend

One of my two favorite weekends of the year is over...
I love conference weekend!
One reason I love it is because it gives me 8 hours to do mindless projects without feeling guilty that I should be getting more productive things done.  I listen much better when I have something to do with my hands.  Otherwise, I just fall asleep.  :-) This weekend I organized our whole piano and violin music file cabinet, sorted, organized, and filed away a 2-foot stack (no exaggeration) of 2 years worth of my extremely artistically prolific sons' artwork, cut 58 rectangles out of foam-board, and mounted 58 5x7 photos on each one for a photo/art project in our front entry-way.  I also made cinnamon rolls for breakfast, and chicken, potatoes, biscuits, and artichokes for dinner.  Not bad!
Ben listened to conference on his laptop outside yesterday while re-planting our front walkway flower beds, and planting our fall garden in the backyard.  Today he successfully reinstalled Photoshop on my computer (NO THANKS to Adobe or Microsoft who are both on our Very Very Bad List) which took him 3 hours (!!).  Thank goodness I'm married to a genius, because if it had been up to me, I would have had to resort to completely reformatting my computer's hard drive.   Or just buying a new computer.  Ben also installed new blinds upstairs in Joseph's room. 
We were rather productive!
My younger sister wrote about the challenges of paying "attention" to conference with a 20-month-old, and it brought back memories from those days for me.  There are advantages to having older kids, although I'd take another 20-month-old in a heartbeat.  The boys were very good, and listened to a lot of the talks while drawing pictures (got to start replenishing that 2-foot stack, after all) and building with blocks.
We ate artichokes tonight, in our quest to expand our vegetable repertoire around here.  Joseph, Ben, and I like them.  Brigham and Mosey, not really.  They're kind of a lot of effort for not very much actual food product, and we wondered who was patient enough to actually figure out how to eat these things!
The boys are now asleep, most of the fallout from the weekend has been cleaned up, and I am going to start the week off right by going to bed on time!