Monkey See...

I'm looking at a box of birthday candles. Underneath the boxed warning label is an additional admonishment: Extinguish candle before throwing away. Can you imagine the lawsuit that prompted that amendment? "Well Bud here couldn't blow out all 96 candles, and the cake was covered in so much spit anyway we just decided to chuck the whole thing, candles and all. Who knew that plastic trashcan would burn like that? Woowee!" (I hope two things: 1-that I did not offend you with that scenario, 2-that you read that with a heavy redneck accent. Thank you.)

Yesterday at our ward conference our Stake President spoke about fear, natural fear vs. adversarial fear. Natural fear can keep us safe while adversarial fear keeps us from doing important things like sharing our talents or learning an important and wise skill because we don't think we're good enough. After introducing his topic he told a series of stories about people that had done really stupid stuff and then died. Cooper was getting noisy so he and I left part way through and I have no idea how those stories worked into the rest of the lesson. But they were still interesting in an awful and shocking kind of way. The one that stuck with me was about a young man who heard about people jumping out of helicopters and skiing down mountains for fun. He wanted to try it too so he got some old skis and attached his sneakers to them using screws. He went up to a high mountain, jumped off the first cliff, and smacked into the second cliff. Our Stake President learned this story from his friend who worked in search and rescue who had to retrieve the young man's body from the mountain.

My question is this: how do I teach the boys to use common sense so that they will stay safe and not light themselves on fire or jump off a mountain in sneaker-skis?

Also, common sense, it would appear, is not so common.