911 Dispatch... what's your emergency?

Now for your reading pleasure, the last story from our trip to St. George.

While we were in St. George, Sarah wanted to do some baptisms in the Temple. Rich and Emily stayed in the condo while we went. Sarah and I had a wonderful time and drove home (the condo) to find Rich and Emily playing pseudo badminton in the street. This is really a loose interpretation of badminton without a net or lines on the ground. Anyhoo, it looked like they were having a fun time. I was a little tired and went into the bedroom and laid down on the bed just to get my feet up for a while. Not two minutes later, Emily came running inside yelling, "The police are outside and I didn't do anything!!"

My next thought was, 'Oh she's probably hit something onto a neighbor's roof or into their yard and the police drove by and now she thinks she's in trouble.' So I say, "Emmy, honey of course you didn't do anything. It's okay." Fifteen seconds later I hear Rich calling for me to come out of the bedroom. "The police are here Tiffany and you need to come out." Me- "Huh?" I jumped off the bed and headed into the living room. Standing there in the hallway as if on his way to the back bedrooms was one of St. George's finest. What on earth is going on? Rich can see I'm totally lost and tries to fill me in. Apparently, just before we came back from the Temple, Rich had been taking a nap while Em was playing in the living room. It was a little grey and windy which is just as good an excuse as any for hot chocolate. She thought I'd brought some down with us and couldn't find it anywhere. She called my cell phone but I turned it off when we were in the Temple and hadn't turned it back on. Then she 'accidentally' dialed 911.

Perhaps she thought they might know where the cocoa was? In all fairness to Emily, the phone had been working sporadically at best. Back to the nice officer. We called Emily out of the bedroom where she was hiding. Em admitted that she called 911 but that she had been trying to dial my cell phone number. Hmmmm. After speaking with the nice folks at 911 for a brief moment, Emily hung up. Guess what? They called her back! Emily tried to assure them she was just looking for the hot chocolate and that she was okay. Just about this time, Rich woke up and took Emily outside to play badminton and we pulled into the driveway. All of this was explained to me as the very nice, very young police officer took in every detail of the condo. I kid you not, he surveyed every inch of the kitchen/dining, hallway and living rooms. It was a time consuming thing for him to do, not because the condo is so spacious, but because every horizontal surface was covered in swimming paraphernalia, arts and crafts and a kitchen/sink full of unwashed dishes and pans. Lovely. (I was on vacation!)

So the nice police officer had been sent to check on us and make sure that all was well. Thank heavens the only black eye I've ever had was skiing related and 10 years ago. I'm also grateful that Rich had shaved and wasn't wearing a wife beater T-shirt. 'We're good officer. No domestic violence. No illicit drugs. No drunken and disorderly. The children are well fed and relatively well supervised.' Needless to say, we had a discussion about what an emergency really is. We apologized for the false alarm and assured him it wouldn't happen again. He was very pleasant and said it was no big deal. After he left, Emily cried and wailed that she was going to have to go to jail. Not so little one. First offenders just get a warning.