African Penguins
This is what the sky looked like this morning. When Isaac saw the sky he said "Mom, I can see Africa. . .Lets watch for the penguins."
Six Days of War by Michael B. Oren
Another one of those books I stumbled on and bought, and I’m glad I did. Even though the events occurred more than 40 years ago, it’s still the same fight being fought, with nearly all the same players (except the USSR, and perhaps Iraq, barring any foolishness after the election. Russia still has a role to play in the Middle East, though; technology to Iran?). It’s the same impotent UN, the same dead-end Arabs, and the same dithering from the US government.
I think most of us are familiar with the strategic victory of the Israelis, with their lightning pre-emptive strike on Egypt’s air power. What’s amazing are some of the diplomatic details. When it became clear Israel was going to smash the united Arab nations, the Israeli goal was to seize as much territory as possible before the UN forced a cease-fire. Early in the conflict, the US government presented a cease-fire plan to the UN security council, and the Israelis, for diplomatic reasons, pretended to be pleased with the plan (while hoping that they would have a few more days to consolidate their gains). Nasser, on the other hand, in desperate need of a cease-fire, was forced (somewhat due to his own propaganda – "We’re in Tel Aviv!") to reject the cease-fire. The result was more time to secure the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Old City of Jerusalem, and the Sinai peninsula.
Anyway, I found the book very readable and actually very balanced. Nasser and Amer are given equal time with Eshkol and Dayan. I would recommend it to anyone interested in a better understanding of the situation in the Middle East.
Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East
Bambi vs. Godzilla by David Mamet
Time for another book review. I’m not sure how I stumbled on this particular book, but it’s a very interesting look at the film industry. It’s a quick read, in an engaging style, and has some great thoughts about the nature of drama and what’s wrong with movies in America. Mamet describes the process of storytelling succinctly: "Once upon a time, and then one day, and just when everything was going so well, when just at the last minute, and they all lived happily ever after. Period."
For a guy like me who isn’t necessarily into movies, it’s a look at the interactions between producers, writers, directors, actors, and the guys doing the grunt work on the sets.
The book also helped me crystallize what makes a good film. I’m notoriously picky about what I like, and wind up keeping my opinions to myself. I’ve been told I don’t make much sense in the movies I don’t like (example: Forrest Gump) and the movies I do like (example: Starship Troopers). Well, I know what I like, and now I know a little better why I like what I like.
Anyway, great read. Pick it up using the link below.
Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business (Vintage)
Our First Primary Program
I don’t think my words will give the experience full effect, but they’re all I’ve got so here goes.
Perhaps we should have taken him to the church ahead of time so he could 
discover all the workings of the folding seat before the program started, but who knows if we could have ever satiated his interest in this particular type of seat. He sat in one of those chairs where the seat automatically closes when you stand up and he wiggled and played with the seat for most of the program. He was so distracted by the seat that I couldn’t make eye-contact with him to tell him not to play with it.
The best part of the program came when they started playing the intro to his favorite primary song "I love to see the temple" he looked and me and said in a surprisingly loud voice "Mom, it’s my favorite song!" then he proceeded to yell the words of the song as loud as he possibly could. I laughed so hard that I cried and everyone I looked at was laughing too. He yelled so loud, that you could hear him clearly above all the other children’s voices. For the rest of the songs I only heard him yell an occasional word because he only knew parts of the other songs. He yelled most of the first verse of "I am a child of God," but he didn’t yell that one as loud.
Family Picture
I should be congratulated for not spending too much money because I was seriously tempted to spend $100 and get several more poses, but alas common sense won over and I just spent $10. I suppose I should be happy with the more than 10,000 pictures on flickr that cost me nearly nothing.
The Singeing
Well, it’s come time to blog about the event that family insiders 
have referred to as "the singing." You’ll have to ask Zach for more details if my description is lacking, but here’s how it happed from my perspective. Zach was starting up the gas grill on Monday night as I was playing with the kids in the backyard and he came around the corner saying something about losing an eyebrow. He was laughing when I looked up to behold a spectacle of singeing expertise. He must have leaned over to see why the grill wasn’t lighting only to be surprised with an explosion of fire which singed his eyebrows, eyelashes and hair. Check out more pictures here. I can only hope that this event is recorded in the family history as the time I ran out of gas on I-15 and had to call for help was recorded and perhaps it will overshadow the day my hair caught on fire as I was blowing out my birthday candles.
When the weather is nice . . .
I just love to be outside with my kids. I can’t stand to be outside when it’s too hot so there are probably months in the summer when I don’t take the kids outside at all, but on days when it’s nice, I just can’t stay in. These are the days I neglect all my housework and spend as much time as I can outside. We started our day with a wagon/bicycle ride to the local old folks home where we participated in a Monday RS meeting program, then we 
rode home, did a few chores then it was back outside for a picnic and play. We invited the neighbors over to join us. Charlotte had much fun playing ‘ring-around-the-rosie" with Makenna. they’d fall down before finishing the song and then kick their feet in the air and laugh. After a haircut and a trip to the grocery store we spent some time outside at Grandma Cochran’s house (beware an upcoming blog involving a gas grill and someone’s hair!)
Time to Cry
When Isaac was 6 months old the Doctor asked me if he was sleeping through the night. When I told him ‘no’ he advised me to just let him cry when he woke up in the night. The first two nights were horrible and he cried and cried, but after getting up 4-5 times a night for six months, I was ready for sleep and thus willing to give it a fair shot. 
The third night he slept all the way through and has not had a significant issue with sleep since. I think there were a few times he cried in the night after that where we had to let him cry himself back to sleep. I tell myself that this is not just me selfishly ensuring my sleep, but that it’s also good for the kid to learn to put himself/herself back to sleep on his/her own. Nicole is not quite six months old, but I’m sitting here at my computer listening to her cry and watching her on my baby monitor–I’m ready for full nights of sleep, sorry Nicole. At least she’s not crying as long as Isaac before falling asleep and I can actually see her little face to make sure she’s ok. (I purchased a neat little camera earlier this year which is hooked up to my TV so I can see her, it’s even got great night vision, the pic above is with no lights on, click here to see a pic with some lights on). Perhaps making all the sleep hyperlinks helped, because now she’s sleeping peacefully.
Bad Hair Day
Charlotte woke up one morning with particularly bad hair. I honestly didn’t tease it or do anything to make it look worse, she just woke up with her hair looking like this and when I saw it I was amused and had to take a picture and today when I saw the picture I decided that it was hair worthy of a blog post! It actually looks much like my hair looked after giving birth to Isaac. You can check out another great angle by clicking here to see the other picture on flickr.
My Little Guinea Pig
Nicole participated in a study on Thursday at the BYU infant development lab. 
They’re studying different auditory-visual responses in 5 month olds. Nicole’s test involved wearing this lovely electrode hat and watching a video. She did rather well and proved to have a good attention span, but was not well pleased when they placed the wet electrodes on her head. She began to squirm, but resisted the urge to cry. Personally, I think this picture reminds me of the old days when my mother would give me a perm at home. It reminds me of the way one looks with perm rods in one’s hair.
Christmas Lists
Hello all. I’ve provided a page where family can put their Christmas desires for easy memory and funtimes. You can reach it here. Please send me a note with what you’d like to add, and I’ll post it up.
Maybe for Christmas
I’ve got some strategies for avoiding the grocery store begging that plagues many 
mothers of young children. First of all, my kids know that when I say no at the grocery store I never give in. Although I’d like to claim that this is because I’ve mastered the element of consistency in parenting, I know that my sense of frugality is sometimes my driving force. The other thing I do is use phrases like "maybe we can make a treat at home" or "we should ask Santa to get you that for Christmas." So far these phrases have worked wonderfully and my kids forget about the desired item entirely by the time we get home!
I could tell Isaac was ready for lunch one day when he started eyeing and asking about the candy in the check-out isle. When he asked me for a particular treat, I told him that perhaps we could make a treat when we got home. He put the candy back and I felt proud of how easily I had avoided a tantrum. He stared picking up candy bars, starbursts, and other impulse items one at a time and saying "maybe we can make something like this at home, " and luckily he put each one back without a fuss. The lady behind me was stunned and commented that she’d never seen a kid so pleasantly accept his mom’s refusal to buy a treat. One time I commented on how he seemed to want us to make our own check-out isle. He liked this idea and regularly comments to me at the store about how our check-out isle should look.
Snow Already?!
Can you believe we just had our first snow of the year?
It seems way too early. Isaac and Charlotte were thrilled and bugged me all morning to let them go out and play. Once the baby fell asleep I took them out and let them run around and make snowballs while I attempted to take pictures. I got very few pictures where you could see their faces since they spent most of the time looking down at the snow and didn’t want to be bothered to look up at my camera. Charlotte’s favorite thing was to pick up a handful of snow, throw it on the sidewalk and then dance on it. Isaac enjoyed making snowballs at first but then started picking up as much snow as he could and then offering to give it to his sister or his mom.
The fun never ends. . .
So here’s a few more comments from this morning to go with last night’s post:
"It’s snowing! It’s snowing! It’s Christmas!!" –Isaac said this as he excitedly danced around the house just after viewing snowflakes falling this morning.
"I want stinky underwear!!!" Charlotte cried this over and over upon having her soiled underwear changed. Given the choice of clean underwear or a diaper she again exclaimed "I want stinky underwear!"
A fly on the wall in our house
I’m sure it’s not often the wish of many to be a fly on the wall in our house (although 
there have been a few flies in the house entertaining cats, but my hand-held-battery-powered-tennis-racket-shaped-fly-zapper seems to have alleviated that problem). Here are some of the things you might have heard if you were that unzapped fly:
"All our prayers are working!" — Isaac, after praying to find things and then finding them.
"That’s a regular baby." — Charlotte, in reference to Nicole (she needed to differentiate Nicole from her dolls).
"The mail man sent me something to send him some mail." — Isaac, after opening some junk mail and finding a return envelope. Later he decided we should put a chocolate bar in the envelope and send it to Ohio for his grandma Bunny.
"it IS a night time prayer!" — Charlotte, after thanking Heavenly Father for the food and blessing it in her bedtime prayer. Her mother told her that she said a dinner prayer, but she insisted it was a night time prayer and continued to bless the food for several more nights.
"So you don’t feel smelly? If you feel smelly you won’t give anyone food?" — Isaac, after I told him I was going to go take a shower.
"It is funny to knock over Isaac’s building" –Charlotte, after knocking over Isaac’s building. Isaac cried and Charlotte laughed and ran into the living room where I told her that it wasn’t funny to knock over her brother’s buildings. She repeated this phrase a few times with such insistence that it was hard not to laugh (which might have proved her point).
"That game is for Daddies when they don’t want to play with their kids?" –Isaac asked this question to his father who was playing a game with "boomers" in it (refer to the toddler dictionary).
Comments?
Till now you’ve needed a login to comment on our blog entries which results in many sad comment-less entries. Now the floodgates are open so feel free to leave us a note (I’d like to think someone is actually reading our blog). Just know that I’ll be moderating the comments and my red teacher grading pen has been bored and lonely since I stopped teaching school.
My next new car
"You like this kind of car so you would buy it?"
"There’s a special checkout for the car, you can drive it up and buy it."
Isaac built this car the other day and then he was so pleased with it that he talked about it continuously as he followed me around the house. The above quotations are the only ones out of his stream of speech about the car that I could remember.
Good Morning. . .there’s a cat in your bed.
Site Problems
For some reason I couldn’t view or post on Virtute for a few days so I should have multiple posts today :) I’ll see how many I can post before the baby on my lap starts wiggling too much.
Prayer
This morning Isaac told me he couldn’t find his water bottle and asked if we could pray to have Heavenly Father help him. So we said a little prayer and almost as soon as we said ‘Amen,’ he found the water bottle. Later when he was putting on his sandals he said "Should we pray for my old sandals? Then I could have two pairs of sandals!"
I know the picture has nothing to do with the post, but I love pictures so I can’t post without one.