Say what!?  Yep, Kathryn and I adopted 9 teenage kids for the weekend for our Stake Youth Conference.  The Youth Conference this year was located at the Heber Valley girls camp.  Here is our family:

(Sorry the picture is a little blurry.  The hand taking the picture wasn’t the steadiest it seems.)

The theme was SMILE: spiritually-minded is life eternal from 2 Nephi 9:39.  We had some great firesides and morning-sides.  One of the things I shared with our kids that I felt tied in well with the SMILE theme was the quote

• Thoughts lead to feelings
• Feelings lead to actions
• Actions lead to habits
• Habits determine character
• Character determines eternal life 

Like it says in Proverbs 23:7 “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he…”  Who you are really does all start with your thoughts, so smile!

Another highlight as far as the instructional part of Youth Conference goes came from Rachael Tomco, an anatomy professor at BYU who is in our stake.  She gave an incredible lesson on how our bodies are temples and one of God’s most wonderful creations.  Nothing that man makes can even compare with the wonder and splendor of the body.  She had some really cool visual aids too, including

• An artificial hip joint
• A pacemaker
• A lung from a 103 year old lady and one from a smoker who died at 40 some years old
• A heart that had undergone double bypass surgery
• A brain
• A spinal cord

It was so cool to see all these amazing parts of our body.  Just a really cool experience.

A large part of the youth conference was activity based.  Being winter up in the mountains a lot of it involved playing in the snow naturally.  The weather has been quite warm lately, but there was still a good amount of snow up there.  In the day when the sun was out, it was warm enough to be in short sleeves.  When the sun was not shining brightly, it could be quite chilly.

One of the activities was to make snow forts.  This one was from our group as was by far the best.

We also worked on a humanitarian aid project making hats.  It was a lot of fun to do.  Maybe Kathryn and I will start making these while watching tv.  Who knows.

We also had a lot of fun during family time.  I took this cool panorama shot of the inside of our Yurt while we were playing the game “Signs.”  The Yurt is a circular cabin with bunk beds around the wall.  When you where “it” during the game, it felt like you where on trial being judged the way the people where sitting up high above you on all sides.  Kathryn and I made a quadruple batch of muddy buddies that where a huge hit too.

All too soon, Saturday afternoon came and it was time to go home.  We had an amazing time at Youth Conference and loved our family.  They were fantastic.  We look forward to seeing them around at other stake activities in the future.