Tabletop Confessions

After church yesterday, Amber got a phone call from one of Aylee's primary teachers. She had some concerns with the reverence and respect in the class as a whole. She said that Aylee is usually really good, but there are times that she chimes in with the rest of the crew...today was one of those days.

Amber and I decided to make it a discussion at the dinner table. I don't believe in singling people out in a group for correction (I prefer to do that in a one-on-one setting), but we thought this might be a good way to get an open dialog flowing. We also hoped that it would help the offender realize what they were doing so that she would decide to improve herself on her own.

We started by talking about their classes at church and how well their class is doing t listening. We asked broad questions about reverence and respect. We asked about who the most reverent people are and what makes them that way. We then asked them about irreverent examples in their class.

After this discussion I asked everyone at the table how their own comportment was for the day and how they thought they could improve. Aylee was still completely oblivious to any wrong-doing and chimed in that she was trying very hard to be respectful and would continue to do so. Johnathan, on the other hand, (who has been doing remarkably well in class this year) opened up and confessed to a bunch of things that he figured was irreverent that he has done in his past primary classes. He ended with a heart felt commitment of change.

It was a pretty funny exchange. Here we were trying to get Aylee to realize some faults and instead, Johnathan catches the wave and opens everything up to us. So, next time should we focus on Alayna's behavior and then maybe Aylee will confess?

Scripture Time with Amber

While I was attending a meeting last night, Amber went up to lay with each of the kids to talk to them before they fell asleep. When it came time to visit Johnathan, Amber sat next to him on the bed and started talking to him. She asked him if he had read his scriptures yet for the evening. John replied in the affirmative. Wondering how much reading he really did, she probed further, "How much did you read?" Johnathan replied that he had read half of a page. Now to check his comprehension, Amber continued her inquiry, "Well, what did you read about?" Johnathan replied that he read a part where an Angel was showing Nephi a lot of different things.

Amber recalled from memory that this must have been in the middle of first Nephi. Thinking of 1 Nephi 11:18, "And he said unto me: Behold, the virgin whom thou seest is the mother of the Son of God, after the manner of the flesh."

She decided to help Johnathan understand what he was reading. So, she asked him, "So, did the Angel show Nephi the Mother of Jesus?" Johnathan responded with a "No." Johnathan then opened his scriptures and reviewed the chapter for Amber. Then he excitedly replied, "No, wait, I guess he did." Amber said, "Well, lets read it together."

Johnathan pointed out the verse to Amber:

13 And it came to pass that I beheld that the great mother of abominations did gather together multitudes upon the face of all the earth, among all the nations of the Gentiles, to fight against the Lamb of God.
• • •
16 And as there began to be wars and rumors of wars among all the nations which belonged to the mother of abominations, the angel spake unto me, saying: Behold, the wrath of God is upon the mother of harlots; and behold, thou seest all these things—
17 And when the day cometh that the wrath of God is poured out upon the mother of harlots, which is the great and abominable church of all the earth, whose founder is the devil, then, at that day, the work of the Father shall commence, in preparing the way for the fulfilling of his covenants, which he hath made to his people who are of the house of Israel. --1 Nephi 14:13-17

Amber must have been thinking about the wrong chapter! Needless to say, Johnathan had some questions thereafter about what mother the angel was talking about.

Maybe I should stay at home more to monitor Amber's scripture discussions with our children. :-)

Another surgery!

I had surgery again on the 22nd of March - My first being on the 22nd of Feb. They didn't find much on the first and were starting to blame my poor gallbladder. I thought that they were going to take it out....but they ended up putting a scope down into my stomach. I don't know many results yet, but he took 2 more biopsies. It's a good thing I work in the OR because right as they were putting me to sleep the doc walks in and says...We are doing a colonoscopy with no sedation, right....Just as I screamed no...he says thats right....we're not, but we didn't have time to clean the scope between cases. Man oh man, if I didn't work there I would be really worried they were serious....
Hmmmm...I think they were kidding. Anyways, I came out, without having breath smelling of poop. I did have to have oxygen, although the guy next to me in the recovery room who was 83 did not have to. I did have a few tatoos that I couldn't account for, kept finding more and more later in the day. But I felt pretty ok. Took the kids on a bike ride and played church volleyball that night.
Wish me luck at work on monday, and tuesday at my doc appointment.

Sometimes I think she just knows that she is cute! Jenna loves to have pictures taken of her, and she just loves to see her picture as soon as it is taken.



Sometimes the pictures are of just her, and well, of course her shadow.



Jenna loves to hang out with big sister Micah. She is the world to her.




And sometimes Jenna and Mommy just love to be together.

Pets

We all know how much Aliece loves animals. If there is an animal or bug of any shape or size, she is all over it.

The other day, Aliece asked Amber, "Mom, when can we have an animal?" Knowing full well that we aren't going to have any pets in the immediate future, Amber stalled by returning the question, "Well, what kind of animal were you thinking of."

Aliece responded, "Oh, I don't know, maybe a cow?"

The Conference Indicator

Last night while we were cleaning up from Dinner, Amber and I told the kids that in just two weeks it would be conference. We all shared our excitement. Aylee was the last one to chime in with her enthusiasm, "That means we get to see if President Hinckley is still alive!" (We had just been talking about the ages of their grandparents and great grandparents - President Hinkley's age came up in that discussion also).

We explained to Aylee that he is still alive. We don't have to wait for Conference to find out those kinds of things - that it would be in the news and church magazines.

Ready for Scriptures

For some time now, Amber and I changed our family scripture reading to be 7:00AM sharp. We have the kids sit in the living room in a reverent manner to practice our reverence at church. It has really helped us out a lot - though we are still not perfect.

Usually, if Aliece and Alayna are still asleep, we let them sleep while we have our scripture study -- this is mostly for sanity during the rest of the day.

Anyway, these past few weeks, if there are days when Amber and I are still getting ready upstairs, we come downstairs and the kids are sitting in their spots on the living room with their scriptures on their lap. It is pretty dang cool!

This morning, I hopped in the shower before it was time for the kids to get up. By the time I got out, it was time to read scriptures. I woke Amber up and headed outside the room. I was afraid, however, that everyone was still asleep and that we would be late getting started. Aylee and Johnathan's rooms were dark. I flicked on the lights only to find that they weren't in their rooms. I went down stairs and to my wonderful surprise, Aylee and Johnathan were sitting in the dark living room with their scriptures open on their laps to our current page of reading. I turned on the light and we started our scripture reading for the day.

It sure touched my heart to see how seriously they have taken to our family scripture reading time.

Geocaching Milestone

It was a gorgeous day outside - the perfect day for the Arbonboy Team to get their 100th Geocache!!! We spent the entire afternoon (1:00 - 7:00PM) yesterday with our neighbors, the Hirtzels out west of Utah Lake climbing hills with our pickups and grabbing some geocaches. Our 100th cache was called "Nutty Putty". After driving up a very rocky and steep terrain, we hiked a third of a mile up a hill to grab the cache. The cache was named after the Nutty Putty cave which was close by.


The Hirtzels were the ones that introduced us to Geocaching nearly two years ago. Although they had started geocaching only a couple of months before we did, they have found three times as many as we have. On this very trip they found their 300th geocache. We had a lot of fun driving on the dirt backroads of the desert and four-wheeling the rough places.

We got back home around 7:00 and our entire family was exhuasted!

Lucky Rabbit's Foot

Everyone knows Aliece's love for animals of all sorts, shapes, sizes, and states (states, you say...well, I'll explain later).

While we were out geocaching yesterday, we let the kids run around in the desert while we were signing the cache's log book. As we were returning to the truck, my head snapped quickly around from hearing Amber's piercing scream. She was looking at Aliece who was climbing into the truck. Amber had her hands waving frantically in the air. My heart leaped in my chest as I ran back around to their side of the truck to see what was going on. I arrived at the door where Aliece was climbing into the truck and found a beige furry thing sticking out the back of her shirt.

"There is a mouse in her shirt," was my first though, but it didn't really look like a mouse. Seeing her mother's distress Aliece reached back behind her and pulled out the treasure that had brought about her mom's fit. Aliece had found a rabbit's foot and stuck it down her shirt. The foot was still attached to its entire leg bone. The only part that had fur and skin on was the foot itself, the rest was dried leg bone and tendons.

Amber made her discard of her newfound token of good luck immediately and wiped her hands down quickly with the remaining supply of wet wipes we had brought with us.

Aliece was pretty shaken by the whole ordeal. With Amber's screaming fit, she thought she had done something terribly wrong. When we got in the truck and started driving again, she said in a nervous voice, "Mom, please don't tell Grandma!"

Beeping Heart

For the past few weeks Aliece has been into monitoring her heart rate - in a five-year-old fashion. Her terminology for a beating heart is a "beeping" heart.

Anyway, a few weeks ago we were doing something strenuous as a family. Exhausted, Aliece louded exclaimed, "Oh, man, my heart is beeping!!!"

Johnathan quickly responded, "That's a good thing, Aliece!"

What do Children Cost

With insurance nowadays, children can be a relatively cheap thing to acquire. However, I think we have all read those articles regarding the estimated cost of a child in the lifetime of a parent - I think the amount went possibly into the millions.

Well, we almost had an experience where one of our children at least added a few thousand dollars to that tab!

Aliece loves to be the one to get our mail during the day. She often gets it and puts it on the office door. One time I made the mistake of letting her keep a credit card advertisment letter that contained some sample credit cards. She loved them a little too much and now asks about every piece of mail to see if they have a credit card in them.

Well, the other morning I was getting out of the shower when Aliece came running by saying that she received an important letter. She was holding a rather large envelope that is typical of junk mail, and it was morning so I knew the mail hadn't just come, so I told her that was nice and shoed her away.

As she was leaving, I noticed that the envelope was a harder one and had FED-EX written on it. I started to rethink my counsel to her and I had her show me "her special letter". I guess a few days previous, FedEx had brought this important envelope that she had opened and played with. I examined the ruffled contents to find a check for over $3,600 from one of my internet customers!

Since the envelope was already opened by the preschooler and played with a couple days previous, I am a lucky man that it was still in one piece and in that envelope!! I was not expecting a check from the individual as they were going to pay with a credit card, so I would have never known that they sent it and that it was confiscated by my child.

As I finish writing this, I have to admit, I am still looking for some year-end tax statements that should have arrived in January...

Am I too Protective?

Ok, I admit, I am not the most wild-and-crazy person on the earth. In fact, I am much more conservative than most people. Besides my love for skiing and enjoyment of crazy theme park rides, my recreational activities are pretty low-key. While I am a conservative person, I do not like to raise wimps. We let our children run and play - even if it means they are going to fall down and get scraped or bumped. We let them ride bikes in the street as well as brand the cows in Arbon. We have always tried to encourage our children rather than shield them from pain and hurt.

The subject upon which I am basing my self evaluation is that of tree climbing. Now, I had trees while growing up in Arbon. We had nice sized Willows that we would climb every so often. We even had a few tree houses in them. I was never afraid to climb them, nor did I think it was too dangerous.

I remember however, as a young 6 year old, I was climbing Grandma and Grandpa Call's apple trees in their yard. I distinctly remember getting stuck, in the tree at an intimidating height of five feet above the ground. In my plea for help, one of my uncles came to my rescue and lifted me down. I still climbed the tree and got used to it, but still those trees weren't much higher than 10 feet or so - at least the highest that I ever went. My experience with trees has been minimal, but they have always been sturdy, well matured trees.

On Tuesday, Aylee and Johnathan decided to show me what they had been working on. Amber had told me that they had been climbing trees and I thought that was cool. They climbed a couple of trees for me and then we went for a walk and let the kids ride their bikes. Aylee and Johnathan rode ahead and beat us home. As we were walking home I saw Aylee at least 20 feet in the air atop one of our Aspen trees. I just about died. I took a quick picture and then asked her to come down. Amber thought I was being a little over protective (and this coming from a lady who won't set foot in Lagoon's Tidal Wave ride), but all I could see was one of those soft, quaken aspen branches snapping and Aylee tumbling to her brain damaging, neck snapping, back cracking end.

So, I ask of you -- am I too over protective? If I turn a blind eye to the situation are my kids going to be jumping off of our two-story home onto the trampoline, running out in front of passing cars to see how close they can get to them, or even law down on the ground and let their friends and cousins jump their motorcycles over their prostrate bodies. If I refuse to let them climb the trees are they going to be scared of butterflys, consider themselves brave for getting their eyes wet in the bathtub, or even (gasp) play freeze-tag on the school playground.

Parenting is way too hard.

I'm not a Princess!

Well, Alayna has reached another growth milestone. All of our kids have allowed us to call them pet names such as kiddo, buddy, and princess. However, at a certain age, they start to get this feeling of identity that tells them that their name is everything and they can't be called by anything else. Well, today was the day that it happened for Alayna.

This morning I walking into the kitchen where Alayna was eating. She smiled at me and said, "Hi Dad!". I gave her a hug and said, "How is my little princess?" She rebuked me by saying, "I'm not a Princess, I'm Alayna!" I have called her "Princess" every day since she was a tiny little baby.

Just to make sure that it wasn't a fluke, I tested the P word on her a couple of other times this morning. She followed up with the same response each time. I guess she is growing up.

We'll see if she continues with the identity issue over the next few days. If it doesn't change and if she is like our other children, I'll have to wait about four years before she'll probably let me call her that again.

Over the weekend

This weekend was a crazy one for us. Of course, I had school Friday night and Saturday morning. After school on Saturday, we loaded the van and headed up to Pocatello for Crista's Wedding reception. On the way over, we stopped off at Grandma Call's house for a quick visit and to let Aylee and Amber change into their "reception" clothes. We had a great visit with Grandma. It was fun to be there.

Grandma has a bunch of family pictures on a shelf in her family room. She has made little picture holders out of Legos so that all of the photos are free standing. Aliece and Alayna played with the pictures quite a bit. As we were getting ready to go, Grandma noticed that the girls had moved all of our family pictures up to the front of all the other pictures and lined us up in a row. Grandma got a kick out of that.

The reception was fun. It was great to see family again. Crista and Andrew looked great, of course. I do have to say that the reception line was the slowest and longest that I have ever seen!

After the reception, we met up with Mom and Dad, Jen, Dave, Chloe, Joe and Nae in Arbon and visited a while before going to bed. In the morning, we woke up, ate some cereal and said our goodbyes. We rushed home just in time to get kids showered, dressed, fed, and off to church where I had to speak in Sacrament meeting and Johnathan had to speak in Primary. Let us not forget, Aliece had to be sung to during opening exercises for her birthday too!

Happy Birthday Aliece

Just wanted to wish our dear Aliece JoAnn a very happy 5th birthday today!!! Aliece has been counting down for about twenty days. She has kept very specific track of when this birthday was coming. She is so dang cute! She has been funny though, we has this thing about the kids singing happy birthday to her during her party. For weeks she has said, "I don't want them to sing Happy Birthday to me!" We'll see how that goes!

Wendy Maria Cox was born today at 7:27am. She was 6lbs 8oz and 19.25 inches long. Wendy and I are both doing great and LeeRoy and I can't wait until we can take her home.

Love,
The Coxs

Jen's Helper

Alayna has always been a little mommy in the family. From her earliest bipedal days, she has been toting around little baby dolls. She spends hours upon hours feeding, dressing, and pushing them in her little stroller. It is no wonder that now Jen has a baby, little Alayna is always at her side.

Any time we are with Jen and Dave, Alayna is Jen's constant companion. She insists upon helping Jen feed Chloe, hold Chloe, burp Chloe. Alayna is content to sit right up to Jen's side and intently watch everything that Chloe does.

New Baby in the Family

Craig and Andrea had a baby boy this week.

"Just wanted to let everyone know that Andrea had her baby. He was born on Thursday morning. He is a healthy 7 pounds, 20 inches long. We named him Rush Thomas Brown. -- Craig"