Albany

Saturday was a Multi-Stake Priest & Laurel Conference up in Albany.  I was really stressed trying to get our youth involved with it because I couldn't get any leaders to volunteer to go.  Obviously we have no car and a baby so a full day up state as well with a total of about 5 1/2 hours in a car seemed impossible.  Long story short, a family in the ward lent us their van for the day, and Marcus, Chase, and I drove four youth up state for the conference.

We left at 6:15 AM, can't you tell?  :)

Chase did pretty well in the car.  Only one minor mishap.

Marcus was a good sport and drove both there and back.
The drive was really neat watch the amazing city sites turn into huge homes with tons of grass.

The Albany Stake Center (just a little different from ours haha)

Most of the day we hung around the stake center.  The kids attended workshops, had mixers, and of course ate lots of food.  I helped with the dessert trays-- the amount of food there was ridiculous!  So much!  But what do you do when you have (550) 16 and 17 year olds?!

The youth were from all over the east, obviously all over New York, but also places like Connecticut and New Hampshire.  It was fun to see so many LDS kids in one place.  And one of the girls from our ward and I were laughing because we had never seen so many white kids in the same place in NY either :)  Queens is definitely full of a lot more ethnicities.

Well, Chase was one of the only little guys there.  One of the ladies from the Albany Stake invited us to go to a small egg hunt her ward was hosting.  It was a nice break for Chase of just hanging around the stake center.

He really liked the plastic eggs.

And he quickly discovered how to open them to find candy.

He would share. :)

We also met the biggest basset hound ever.  He was really sweet, and Chase loved him.  It was hard to get a picture of Chase smiling, but it was an instant friendship.

Chase and his buddy

Dog kisses

Laughing with the dog -- 

You'll wish this video was longer, I promise.

Like I said before, there was a lot of walking around the church and around the building.  It was a beautiful day, so we took full advantage of sitting in the grass.  We could all use some good vitamin D :)

And Chase got to meet another dog at the church.  This one was a tiny, 6 week old puppy.  He was too quick to get a cute picture of both the dog and Chase.

Trying to get to the puppy

Petting the puppy

It was definitely a long day, but it went by a lot faster than I thought it would.  It was fun to meet youth and leaders from so many different states and hear about things they've done in their YW programs.

The dinner and dance were themed "Under the Sea."  The hosting stake did a fantastic job planning and decorating.  It was inspiring.  I wish I had taken more pictures throughout the day, but I was cutting trays and trays of desserts.

The dinner tent

The dance

The best picture I could get of the decorations in the evening.
Looked so much better in person!

So many kids!  And they'd actually all dance!
It was incredible :)

It was so worth the craziness of trying to figure out the transportation and eventually just recruiting Marcus and Chase to come along.  The kids had a great time.  They chatted non stop about it on the way home until they all crashed.  I'd say it was a quiet ride home, but Chase decided not to sleep and to talk the entire drive.  "Mama?  Mama?  Mama?  Stop.  Mama?"  Yep, over and over for almost three hours.  But it was a beautiful drive into NYC with all the lights.  Too bad it meant we had to drive through the city-- that was a bit scary :)