Memorial Day 2011

Boy, has it been a long time since the last post! Lots has happened since then... birthdays, Christmas and Christmas Train, Mother's Day, museum visits, trumpet playing, Vacation Bible School. And now it's Mikey's last week of 5th grade! But I really wanted to mention the great time we had this weekend down in Texas with my brother's family.

I took Friday off from work so we could go down a little early; as it turned out, we let Mikey go to school and drove down to the Fort Worth area afterward. Saturday Candi had to work (at home), so the rest of us beat it out to the Ray Roberts Lake State Park to go swimming at the man-made beach there. Everybody had a great time and got sunburned (didn't wait long enough after applying sunscreen to go into the water... D'OH!!), and then we went home (with a brief side trip to a favorite thrift store, where my brother bought a disco light that looked totally like a Dalek from Doctor Who) and applied Aloe Vera. After that delicate process, we mounted back up and went to a restaurant called Babe's Chicken Dinner House, where we had some of the best fried chicken and chicken fried steak anywhere!

The next day was Sunday, so as always we went to Kevin and Candi's church with them, but this time was a little different... we lucked out and wound up there on the day of their annual church picnic! They have their picnic at a place called Circle R Ranch, and we ate some barbecue and then all of the kids went out to go swimming. Some of Kevin's kids went back inside later to play Bingo... my two stayed in the pool the whole time! After they closed the pool down but before we left, I had a few minutes to take Hannah down to the pony corral and let her meet and bet two very sweet ponies, Babs and Ginger. I know the girl must have been getting them ready to be put away after the pony rides, but she was so nice, letting Hannah have some time with them through the fence. Hannah loves animals, and I know that was a big deal to her!

(And yes, we wound up getting more sunburned... we've REALLY got to figure out how this sunscreen stuff works!)

Monday morning we weren't quite ready to blow out yet, so Kevin and I took Mikey and Emily out to a friend's pond to fish (Mikey caught the big fish of the day: a bass that was in the neighborhood of 20" from lips to end of tail! Picture below) while Cathy and Hannah went with the rest of the girls to the mall to do, I don't know, whatever girls do at the mall. Everyone had a terrific time; Kevin and Emily and Mikey all caught fishes, but I caught diddly, despite the fact that I had a brand new ball cap I had bought the day before that says "Born to fish, forced to work!" So much for lucky fishin' hats. Maybe I need to poke a few lures into it to activate the fish-catchin' magic. The mall bunch got to ride a carousel, so they had a great time too!

That afternoon Kevin grilled some steaks that Cathy had bought and marinated the day before, and we feasted a feast as good as anything you'll find at a restaurant. Turn that guy loose with a piece of meat, a bottle of propane and a match, and he'll work magic! We wound up leaving much later than we expected, and if you add my poor navigational skills to that (you wouldn't think it would be THAT hard to get from Oklahoma City to Tulsa, but I seem to have an awfully hard time at it) and we wound up getting home about midnight-thirty. But you know what? It was worth every bit of sunburned skin and every mile out of the way we drove. I don't think I've ever had that much fun on a Memorial Day weekend. Thanks so much, Kevin and Candi!


Mikey's Monster Fish!

39th & Memorial

Saturday was my mom & dad's 39th wedding anniversary. Instead of blowing out of town somewhere or something like that, they invited us and a bunch of friends over and had a big cookout! There were people who go to our church, people who used to go to our church, people who never went to our church, family, not-family, neighbors, not-neighbors... and the party actually continued on into the next day as people who couldn't make it Saturday stopped by for leftovers! We had to go home relatively early to get to bed for church the next morning, but when we left my mom had everybody playing Turbo Yahtzee. My mom is a gamin' MACHINE!

Sunday we had a great first service, and then the choir Sunday school class kind of took a week off and we went over to The Edge, our church youth building, to go have praise & worship with the teenagers. They've been really participating in the adult P&W service lately, and we wanted to go over and show them some love too. I think we had maybe a dozen or so adults go over there, basically walk in unannounced and without explanation, and just participate in their song service. We actually had to leave just as the music was ending, so Pastor Robb didn't even have a chance to address us at all. Everybody I talked to REALLY enjoyed it! It was loud and rockin', but honestly... our adult services have leaned that way lately too, so I think we were in our element.

Funny... I wonder if the teenagers wondered how self-conscious it made us feel to be coming into their element. I wonder how I would have felt as a teenager if grownups had come into the youth service? But that's hardly a fair comparison... our youth services were not very much like the ones they have now, and our "youth building" was a room in the back of the sanctuary that wasn't being used for anything else. :)

So we sang and sang with the kids (and I spoke to several people who almost blew their pipes out... I remember realizing partway through that if I didn't cool it I wouldn't be able to croak out a note in adult choir second service! Cathy was hoarse all the next day!) and then we went back over for second service. After all that singing (and standing) I was pretty pooped. Mikey and Hannah were off at Meme's house already, and a friend was taking Cathy out for lunch for her birthday (which was a month and a half ago... that girl KNOWS how to have a birthday!!) so I went over to Meme's for lunch. Guess what we did? We played UNO. Have I mentioned that my mom is a gamin' MACHINE??!?

Monday was Memorial Day. We have an informal family tradition for Memorial Day weekend... whatever else we do, we try to get out to Floral Haven Cemetery for their special Memorial Day activities. The main thing is that they have several thousand flags that go up every year, each one donated by the family of a serviceman and each one labeled with that serviceman's name. It's quite a sight to see. They have a replica of the Tomb of the Unknowns (the real one is in Washington, D.C.) and they have guys who reenact the whole guarding of the tomb and changing of the guard and everything. They also have a permanent display of historical American flags, and the flag in the middle of that display is positively HUGE. We may have to time our trip next year for the retiring of that flag Monday evening. (We missed it by about a half-hour this year.) Anyway, it's always a good thing to go to just to give us time and opportunity to talk about what Memorial Day is supposed to be for. It's not "for" going to the lake or whatever, although those things are fine, and it could be argued that liberty to do those kinds of things are part of what was and is being fought for. But the main point is to remember that liberty comes with sacrifice. So we take part of that one weekend a year and talk to our kids about it. Hannah's a bit young to understand at the moment, but she looked at the flags flapping around, anyway. :)

Footnote: while we were there we ran across the memorial (gravesite?) for Kenneth E. Hagin and his wife Oretha. The man has meant so much to Charismatic Christianity and specifically to Tulsa. Between him on the east side of town and Oral Roberts on the west side, Tulsa is a much different place than it would have been otherwise. It was nice to go sit out there and briefly talk about him to Mikey, too.