Teach Them Diligently Spartanburg 2013

This year we were finally able to get to Teach Them Diligently.  They had three this year, Omaha, Spartanburg and Nashville.  We attended the one in Spartanburg in May.  This is an AMAZING conference that was well worth traveling for, even though we have our state organization's conference here in Richmond.

Sure, it cost a bit more once you factored in getting a hotel, driving to Spartanburg, eating out, etc, but I don't think we will return to the local convention for a variety of reasons.

The convention started Thursday at 5pm.  Since we travel on "Bee Time" (meaning everything takes us twice as long) we traveled down a day early.  So Thursday morning we used the reciprocal privileges to visit the Greenville Zoo!

The best part of TTD is that we were able to bring our entire family to the convention with us.  In fact, it was quite rare to see people without their children.  And there were a ton of large families.  The "big three" (Lainey, Julianne and Xander) as they are known around here, attended the children's program on Friday and Saturday and the "little boys" (Isaiah and Solomon) stayed with us.  No one batted an eye when the boys attended lectures with us.

There was a large variety of speakers and they spoke on a zillion and five subjects.  Okay, so that is a slight exaggeration, but really, it was so hard narrowing down which sessions we wanted to attend.

I attended several of Sally Clarkson's talks.  God used her in ways that I cannot describe.  I needed to hear it all and even spoke to her between speaking sessions.  I bought one of her many books and I'm slowly working my way through it.  It is meaty!

  
God also spoke to us clearly about what to do about Xander's education this coming year.  Our "plan" is to pray every year over the plans for each child.  This year we were stumped about Xander.  For awhile, it looked like he was going to go to public Pre-K, but neither of us had peace about it.  We used the homeschooling convention as a time to focus on praying over that subject and then walked into this session:

And that, was that!

Another plus to going to this particular convention is that we were meeting up with two other families.  We all stayed at the same hotel and the last night, the moms took over the breakfast area and had a "party."  We stayed out way too late, but had so.much.fun and created alot of memories!

 Next year, Teach Them Diligently is adding a National Conference in Washington, DC.  I'm not sure which convention we will attend, but I sure hope we can make it to one of the conventions. 

Here are some other pictures from our time in Spartanburg:

After waiting in the very long lines for lunch, Brandon took Solomon with him to pick up McDonalds and bring it back while Isaiah and Mommy listened to Ken Ham in the main speaking room.  (They had the main speaker piped throughout the "common areas." 

Gaffney, South Carolina!  It's a peach, or a butt... depending which side you are on.  Ha.  My little bookworms asked if it was "James' peach!" 

Xander was incredibly excited to see the "big, big trucks!"  But he was a little confused that the "house store is a truck!??"

Julianne trying to patiently wait for her lunch the first day.  It was unseasonably cool and raining.  Brrr.