The weekend before last my family listened to General Conference, which is a bi-annual meeting for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I had been looking forward to it for probably a month at this point. Let me tell you, it was so worth the wait! By the end I was feeling so motivated to change some things in my life and in my home. I want to share them with y’all!

Technology Goals

We have both some family and personal goals surrounding technology. If you end up trying any of the same things we are, I’d love to hear about it!

Family Goal

Matt and I discussed some different thoughts we had from the talks over conference. We both loved President Oaks’ talk about family ties and the need to increase the connection of our families in the home. Our new goal is to decrease our phone and technology usage. We now have a “phone box” on our kitchen table to put our phones in during the evening. It currently is just an ugly amazon box 😂 and I plan to make something a little nicer that we can run cords into so phones can charge. Stay tuned and I’ll share that on my Hobbies page!

Our goal alongside putting the phones away involves making deliberate connections as a family. We want to do more activities together like singing, reading stories, or playing games. If you have any suggestions for family activities that work well with toddlers, I want to hear them!

Personal Goal

Along side our family goal of using a phone box, I’m also trying to cut back my personal phone usage. I pretty regularly detox from social media, usually because I delete it off my phone, so if I ever don’t answer messages there, that’s why! Right now, I want to decrease my scroll time on news and youtube because I noticed it generally makes me grumpier to be consuming so much from a screen.

Part of how I want to decrease my phone time is to increase time spent toward hobbies or playing with Vivs. I just got my sourdough starter up and running, so you’ll hear more about that in the future! I also want to start practicing music again. We’ll see if that ends up being mostly singing, learning more songs with my banjo, or taking up trying to teach myself piano. If any of you have good activities to do with toddlers, I would love to hear them! I’m looking for good ways to connect Vivs, especially if it’s cheap. 😅

Spiritual Goals

My personal spiritual goal ties into my technology goal as well. I want to start reading the Book of Mormon every day. I currently study at least some scripture every day, usually at minimum I read the verse of the day on the Gospel Library app. Since this year’s Come, Follow Me curriculum studies the Doctrine and Covenants, I mostly keep up with the weekly reading for that. I feel like it’s easier to feel the Spirit when I study the Book of Mormon regularly though, so I’m going to try to do that as well!

Our family spiritual goal is to have a more organized family home evening each week. We had one this week where we sang songs from the Children’s Songbook and had a short thought about Christ being the good shepherd. It was so sweet to hear Vivian sing the songs with us! She amazes me with how much of the song she can sing! Going forward, we’ll try to have a similar setup and just change up the topic.

Conclusion

Did you happen to listen to General Conference this time around? I’d love to hear what your favorite talks were and any goals you set! I need to go back and finish listening to the Saturday evening session. Thankfully, we don’t have to wait too long to get the print versions of the talks on Gospel Library. I can’t wait to jump back into studying those for the next few months!

Much love,

Jaylyn