182nd Annual M&M Sorting Day

Thanks in part to my new Pinterest addiction I found some great ideas for entertaining Isaiah during General Conference while still keeping him a tiny bit focused on the prophets.  I saw several different versions of this idea and then tweaked it to what would work for us.

First I got out a muffin tin and a big bag of M&M's.  Then I made sure Eliza was asleep because I'm sure she would've destroyed this project....Anyway, I dumped the M&M's into a few empty spots of the muffin tin and had Isaiah start sorting.  The sorting lasted about 45 minutes, and he was quiet and focused the whole time (on the chocolate), and he didn't even eat any!

Once all the M&M's were sorted we got 6 paper cupcake liners and put one next to each color of M&M.  Then each of us selected a word to write on a cupcake liner.  I played it safe and chose "Amen" because I knew that would be used at least once per talk, prayer, etc.

Once we had it all set up we started playing the game.  The idea was to listen for one of the six words we'd selected and if you heard the word you got to eat an M&M from the associated muffin tin. This was where it got a bit too tricky for Isaiah.  We helped him a few times, and grandma helped him lots of times (because she loves chocolate).  He did end up hearing some of the words sometimes, but as with most things I plan for my children, they never enjoy it in the way that I want them to for as long as I want them to.  But that's okay.  Zay did some listening, we all did some chocolate eating, and it was kind of fun.

I was thinking it would be fun (when the kids are older) to let them each pick a word or two but they can only eat an M&M if they hear their word, not the word their sibling heard.  Or maybe only the first person to hear the word could eat an M&M.  And, the math nerd in me would like to keep track of how many times each word was said and then make a graph in Excel.  After several conferences I'd have a much better idea of which words are most popular, thus increasing the number of M&M's I'd get to eat... 

I had also printed out a conference packet designed for nursery-aged children for him to use and (again) he didn't use it as intended but he did look at all the pictures and when a general authority spoke we'd try to find his picture in the packet.  He thought it was fun to watch church on TV.

Sidenote:  Isaiah calls our church the Red Church.  The building G&GA attend is the Yellow Church.  The seminary building I take a friend to is called the Tiny Church.  So today I was reading to them from the BofM illustrated book thingy about Joseph Smith.  I told them that Joseph said a prayer because he didn't know which church he should go to, and I asked Zay if he knew what that meant, and he said "Like he didn't know if he should choose the Red Church or the Yellow Church?"  Yes, something like that.