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life pictures Uncategorized

Best Calendar for 2010

On Christmas day there was one gift under the tree that neither Laura nor I knew about. Savannah had made a wonderful calendar for our family for 2010. I just had to share each of the months – it really warmed our hearts to see the work that she had put into this.

January

February

March

April
In case you can’t tell, that shell of the egg opens and closes to reveal the picture.

May

June

July

August

September

October

Things she is thankful for: Mom and Dad, Alyssa, Mariah, Isaac, and Bell (not sure of the reference there)
Things she is thankful for: Mom and Dad, Alyssa, Mariah, Isaac, and Bell (not sure of the reference there)

December

Categories
life

Budding Fashionista

For those who don’t know, Mariah is all girl in every way. It shows up in everything she does from dancing to dressing to interacting with babies. We got another taste of it last night when she had to put her laundry away.

I was tasked with helping her get the job done. We started off very slowly as Mariah and I worked through a philosophical difference. I was trying to convince her to put shirts in one basket and pants in another etc. She wanted to put one outfit in one basket and another outfit in another basket etc. The final compromise was that she could place things together as outfits, but each basket would not be limited to a single outfit (not enough baskets). By the way, an outfit consisted of shirt, pants, socks, a jacket, underwear, and pajamas. Eventually she got bored of assembling the whole set so outfits became shirt and pants (the way I would have defined them).

As we got closer to finished Mariah discovered what I had been trying to tell her before, that she did not have the same number of shirts as pants. She discovered it when she had three shirts left and five pairs of pants to match them with. I was not sure how this situation would play out but Mariah had a great solution – she went to the buckets and pulled out two of the shirts and added them to the remaining shirts so that she had 5 shirts and 5 pairs of pants to form 5 more outfits.

After we got finished I told Laura the story and she insisted that I had to record this adventure with out little fashionista.

Categories
life

The Best Christmas Gift

We have been encouraging the kids to think about what they would like to give to others at Christmas and to go beyond simply spending money or giving away toys they no longer want. The results have been very encouraging. I was most pleasantly surprised when Alyssa apparently decided that something she could give me would be to pack my lunch for me. Of course that does no good on Christmas day so she set to work Sunday evening and packed up the leftovers that I had been planning to take to work yesterday then she wrote me a note saying:

I hope you like your lunch. I packed it.

From Lyssa

To Dad

She left the note on top of the lunch in the fridge for me to find. It was a fabulous gift from a child with an amazing heart.

Categories
life pictures

Family Pictures

When Enoch was born I promised to post a family picture. Things were busy enough that since we were not allowed to take the kids to visit in the hospital we never got around to taking a family picture until three weeks later when we had already scheduled family pictures of our extended family (David’s family) including individual sittings for each of the families in the group. Now it has taken another three and a half weeks to finally get the picture scanned in and posted here.

So without further ado, here is the whole family:

Seven of Us

Categories
technology

Best-Of Comments

Have you ever wanted to share your favorite comments on the front page of your site? I’m not talking about the most recent comments, or the most frequent contributors, but the best comments (most funny, most thoughtful, most appropriate, most rash – whatever your criteria may be). Now you can.

Best-Of Comments allows anyone with the ability to edit comments to mark a comment as “featured” and then featured comments will be randomly selected and displayed anywhere you choose to place the php call to best_of_comments(). You can select how comments are displayed, how many to display, and how much of a comment to display (if comments are longer than the specified word length they contain a link back to the original comment). In the future you will have the ability to limit how far in the past to look for featured comments.

Latest Version 1.2 (December 15, 2009)

Discovered a function call that allowed other plugins which alter the content to possibly interfere with the display of featured comments.

Categories
politics State

Selective History

Perhaps it’s just me, but if I were Michael Otterson I would find it irksome that the same position I had represented for the church for more than a year was suddenly newsworthy as if something had changed.

It looked like a stunning reversal: the same church that helped defeat gay marriage in California standing with gay-rights activists on an anti-discrimination law in its own backyard.

. . .

The ordinances passed and history was made: It marked the first time the Salt Lake City-based church had supported gay-rights legislation.

More than a year ago – months before the votes started coming in for California’s Proposition 8 the LDS Church stated its official position that they were supportive of the basic rights of all people, including homosexuals, such as probate rights and housing rights. They stated that they were amenable in theory to the Common Ground Initiative but could not take a public position on bills that had not yet been drafted.

The position of the church never changed. Some people claim this is a PR move to blunt the backlash over their role in defeating Prop. 8, but the only thing that changed is that unlike the theoretical five bills of the common ground initiative, the Salt Lake City council actually drafted two bills. The church publicly supported the bills – in keeping with the position they had already taken.

Sadly some people still don’t get it and are suggesting that the church should take a further step by actually writing bill proposals for the state legislature to consider which would extend these same benefits statewide that were just passed within Salt Lake City. The fact is that the church will do just have they have done up to this point – they will not write legislation and they will take no position on theoretical bills that have not been written. When bills are written that are acceptable the church will support them. Bills they can’t quite support will get no comment. In the Utah Legislature they don’t even have to worry about addressing bills that are worthy of their opposition.

Categories
life pictures

Welcome Enoch

Almost 3 years to the day after his older brother arrived we got a new arrival today. Stats and story follow.
Name: Enoch Andrew Miller
Arrived: 11:15 am 11/2/2009
Weight: 7 lbs. 5 oz.
Length: 20 1/2 inches

Enoch Miller
Enoch Miller

We had been expecting him for weeks since his two older siblings each came three weeks early – never again. My new motto is “be ready a month early and don’t plan on anything before the due date.” Enoch was not very late as he was due the last week of October, but he held on long enough to make it into November – boy month in our house since Dad, Isaac, and now Enoch all have November birthdays. Unfortunately siblings (under 14) can’t come to the hospital to visit so we can’t get a great little family picture like we had when Isaac was born. We’ll post the best we can get after Enoch gets home.

Categories
life

New Calling

The vast majority of those reading this probably already knew this, but I was recently called to be the Elder’s Quorum President in my ward. I’ve known for a couple of weeks as I had to have time to identify the rest of the presidency and get them called but I did not want to announce it here before it was official (which happened yesterday but I was slow to sit down to write about it) despite the fact that the chances of anyone within the ward reading this before it became public were extremely slim.

The day I was called was exceptionally exciting for me because I have so much respect for my stake president, President Taylor. To have the opportunity to sit with him and answer questions of worthiness and talk about spiritual things from the ward conference we had just had was thrilling. In the few minutes that we had before Laura joined the interview he learned that Laura had missed the stake conference where he was called as Stake President and President Eyring taught about the principle of gathering as well as missing the ward conference two weeks before our interview where President Taylor told of his experience when he was called and felt impressed that gathering was the message for our stake. When President Taylor learned that he volunteered to come to our house and teach our family personally that afternoon. We had been praying for President Taylor, Bishop Tueller, and the First Presidency and Apostles as a family ever since the ward conference (due to an impression I had felt at that meeting) and the children knew each of the people they were praying for except for President Taylor either because they had met them (Bishop) or through their pictures. They enjoyed meeting him so that they knew who they were praying for and Laura and I felt so much love as he taught us about gathering and actually gave us a copy of the talk he had been giving at ward conferences on the subject. What a great way to start our relationship with him as I will have more dealings with him through this calling than I could expect to have without it.

Anyway, I’m very excited to have this opportunity to serve. I have a great presidency with Wes Austin, Jon Nieman, and Alex Monson. Best of all I have an amazing quorum and get to work with a Bishop and Stake President that I really admire. Ever since I was first called I have begun to have greater feelings of respect and concern for the men in the quorum and I’m happy to be in a position where I will have the information which will enable me to reach out and help them in any way that they need it.

Categories
life

Halloween Tradition

Three years ago I would have told you that Halloween was the dumbest/worst holiday on the calendar. Two years ago I did say that it was tolerable. Last year if I had written about it I would have said that it was a really fun to go chat with our neighbors while the kids got more sugar than we would wish them to have. This year we started what we hope will become a tradition (and hopefully we’ll get it refined so that it works very smoothly for everyone) – we gave out hot chocolate as our Halloween treat. For the sake of helping us to remember the details – and because everybody surely wants to know the details of what we want to do for Halloween each year – I am writing how we made this work this year.

Laura made homemade hot chocolate in the late afternoon and we put it in a crock pot on “warm” sitting on a table just inside the front door. We placed an abundance of small paper cups there and then we went out for out round of trick-or-treating. I’m not sure we got it right this year, but the intent is for us to go early enough in the evening that we can catch the bulk of our neighbors home as we circle our block once – I imagine that over the years the kids will expand their range but for now once around that block in about an hour lets us see and talk to a bunch of people and is about enough for their attention. The hope is that this gets us home in time so that few if any local witches, ghouls, and goblins have come to our door before we return. Then we can see them (again in many cases) as they enjoy our warm offering as the evening gets colder. I can seriously envision having our children going out with friends and ending the evening with a hot chocolate party at our house.

Categories
life

Book of Mormon Witness

It’s always interesting to see how people respond to powerful messages from General Conference. Although I spent much of conference somewhat distracted by children (what else is new) I was even able to recognize in that half attentive state that what Elder Holland was saying was powerful. In fact, it was powerful enough that I stopped paying attention to the kids for a minute when I heard him start to share the following testimony:

I ask that my testimony of the Book of Mormon and all that it implies, given today under my own oath and office, be recorded by men on earth and angels in heaven. . . I want it absolutely clear when I stand before the judgment bar of God that I declared to the world, in the most straightforward language I could summon, that the Book of Mormon is true.

When I heard that I thought that I would be happy to stand with Elder Holland and declare, with much less public office, that I know for myself that the Book of Mormon is truly the word of the Lord tailor made for our day. I consider that to be absolutely public information recordable and repeatable by anyone who would care to record or repeat it. The message obviously touched others as it inspired Connor Boyack to create a website called Book of Mormon Witness where anyone may add their witness to that shared by Elder Holland. Hundreds of people have already added their names in the last three days since the site went live.