Ten Years

Today's an emotional day for us. We're moving out of the house we've lived in for ten years, four and a half months. It's the longest period of time in my life that I've ever lived in one place.

Mikey was only ten months old when we moved into this house in East Tulsa in February of 2001. Cathy had wanted to live in this area since she was a little girl and much of it was brand new; 30 years later it wasn't quite as new and sparkly, but we loved it anyway. We've celebrated many important events in this house: we made a baby and celebrated a birth. We've celebrated many birthdays, including the first birthdays of both of our children. Ten Christmases and ten Easters. Ten anniversaries. Four full-time jobs for myself, not counting the flurry of short consulting gigs during the second year we lived here, when I had been laid off by an ailing company right after the dot-com bust + the WTC attacks. Four deaths of people we were very close to happened while we lived in this house, and two more of relatives who were much-loved but a little more distant. Lots of potty training. Five years of Cub Scouts. Three years of Christian School in two different schools, two years of home schooling and one year of public school. Several seasons of soccer. Brutal heat and crazy amounts of snow. Out of electricity once (or was it twice?) for a week or two at a time because of ice. Two different churches. Two different dogs and two pet frogs. Three different cars. Lots of movies and music. Lots of laughing, lots of crying. Lots of friends.

It's been a good run. I'm looking forward to the next ten years in Bixby!

Vacation Bible School 2010

This week was Vacation Bible School at The Bridge Church! In past years I haven't been able to volunteer at VBSses because they were in the daytime, but we did an evening program this year (Tuesday/Thursday/Friday), so Cathy and I both signed on to help. And, of course, Mikey signed up to participate. (Hannah is still a couple years too young, sadly.) Boy, did we have a great time!

Initially, Cathy just signed up to bring some homemade snacks one day. We were going to work in the "food shop" where the kids were going to get their snacks. Children's Pastor Pete came over to me at the training session the Friday night before, though, and asked me if I would help out in the games room instead, and I said that would be fun. But then he had another idea.

This VBS was Egyptian-themed, and one part of it was going to be a nightly visit with "Joseph" who would tell a piece of his life story every night. They had someone ready to do it for Thursday and Friday, but on Tuesday he couldn't make it. Pete asked me if I would play Joseph on Tuesday, and then be understudy to the other Joseph the other two nights in case something happened to him. I said sure! I've done the tiniest bit of acting, and Cathy and I have actually taught children's classes once or twice before, so I'm not scared of a roomful of kids. It sounded like fun!

So on Friday night, I received a script for about a 10-12 minute monologue to deliver as Joseph in prison. I memorized a lot of it, using the script, some index cards, and listening to myself reading the whole thing into my MP3 player, and so I knew it well enough to muddle through. I was ready when day 1 of VBS came around!

I'd say we had in the neighborhood of 20-25 kids total at VBS every night. I wound up playing Joseph Tuesday, and then the main Joseph had car trouble on Thursday so I was Joseph again (2 days to memorize that script), then for the sake of continuity, I got to do it again Friday night (one day to memorize that part)! It's a really fun script; there are a lot of times when the kids get to comment on the story, or they get to get up and do something. It's very participatory. (Favorite kid-participation line: the kids are pretending to be the cows from Pharaoh's dream, and I say, "I don't know where YOU're from, but here in Egypt, the cows make these loud MOOing sounds!") One night I even got to wear a "bald cap" and surprise the kids when I whipped off my headdress and had a shaved head! (the skull cap was NOT very convincing... but it was funny!) The kids came through in three groups, and every group was different. Kids really keep you on your toes, too... you can't be too married to the script, because sure enough someone's going to say something and you'll have to respond to it! You have to think on your feet! I recorded myself several times on my MP3 player and I wish I could go back and erase some "um"s, but overall I felt happy with my work. I really believe God was working with me, because that was a LOT of material to memorize in a short period of time.

Cathy was able to come Thursday and Friday night; Tuesday she had other plans and couldn't make it, but after hearing me and Mikey talking so excitedly about it, I think she was pumped! On Thursday she wound up being a servant girl in the palace where Joseph was, keeping us cool with a palm frond. (Funny palm-frond moment: Cathy had started to get interested in the story, or was looking at the kids or something, and forgot to keep fanning. One of the kids said: "It's getting hot in here!" I could see Cathy not fanning from the corner of my eye, so without looking directly at her, I pointed at her over my shoulder and said, "My air conditioner is broken down!") On Friday she fanned for a little bit, but then one of the adult "family leaders" had an emergency and had to leave, so she went with that family group for the rest of the night. She had made a snack called "palace bread" for snack time on Friday, and I'm not sure she was happy with how it came out, but I did notice that there were zero leftovers at the end of the night, so it must have gone over well!

Every night there was some music at the beginning and end, with LOTS of hand motions and DANCING! Our final dance on the last night was particularly BIG and BOISTEROUS and LOUD! There's a part in the song where it says "Your [God's] love has brought us together..." and all the kids are holding hands in a circle, and they all come together in the middle. That night they RAN together! For a minute I thought they were going to bash heads! OUCH! (They didn't.) After that they had a brief lesson with their "family leaders" and then they got to go do activities... hieroglyphics, face painting, "shaving" (with olive oil), making an Egyptian collar, making an Egyptian head band, painting a canopic vessel (one of those "King Tut" coffin things), playing games, making bricks out of mud, having snacks, and visiting with Joseph. After that they had another brief lesson with their families, and then the closing music for the day. You could tell by the looks on their faces and they way they acted that the kids were having a blast!

Every day they were there the kids got coins with the memory verse and theme of the day on them to take home and keep. Mikey really enjoyed writing on the hieroglyphic wall (brown butcher paper on the wall in the hallway). He says they wrote an advertisement for the "barber shop" on the wall, and then he drew a triforce (from the Zelda video games on Nintendo!) He had a lot of fun making his Egyptian collar. But his favorite part was making the mud bricks. Boys like stuff that is MESSY!

When I asked Mikey his favorite part about VBS, though, he surprised me. His favorite part was actually the lesson times. Not only the Joseph story that I was acting out as a mini-drama, but also the little lessons the family groups talked over with each other at the beginning and end of the day. It's pretty high praise for the curriculum when a child thinks of mentioning the Bible lesson before he thinks to mention playing in the mud!

The final night after singing "Lord, You Are Mighty To Save" we had an altar call for anyone who wanted to receive Jesus into their hearts - nobody responded, but I'm pretty sure they were all kids from our church so I'd say that wasn't entirely unexpected. Pastor Pete did invite them to come up for prayer if they had something they wanted to ask God for, and several did come up. Pete had asked me and Cathy to be ready to come up and help pray for the children, so we did that. I think Cathy has a burden now for one of the kids who was in her family group - he came up for prayer and she prayed with him. I prayed for a little girl. We didn't actually ask them what they needed prayer for; Pastor Pete prayed a sort of blanket prayer, and we were led by the Holy Spirit as to what to pray for the kids individually while he was praying for all of them.

I think VBS was a SMASHING success. I don't think they even had a VBS program at The Bridge last year; the children's ministry wasn't fully organized yet at that time. For a first VBS at a small church, I'd say it was an amazing success. It would have been a great effort even at a much larger church. We had TONS of adult volunteers who all had wonderful attitudes (and who looked great dressed up as Egyptians!) the whole time, and there were almost as many volunteers from the youth group as from the adults. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I am so impressed with the teenagers from The Bridge Church. They always seem ready to jump in and help with things; they always have a good attitude; they are kind to the children (even when it's not VBS); and I'll tell ya... they're just a good-looking bunch! Over the three days I don't ever remember seeing any children who looked unhappy or bored, or who left and didn't come back the next day. It was great fun! We're pooped, though... last night I couldn't get wound down until after midnight, and I slept until nine this morning. I'm in the habit of getting up to get ready for work every morning at 6, and sleeping past 7 is amazing for me. I was worn out! But it was TOTALLY worth it!



I took some snapshots on Sunday afternoon as we were setting up; another church had loaned us some set pieces from their VBS using the same curriculum, and let me tell you... they were IMPRESSIVE. Take a look at the pictures at this link!

Happy Used-To-Be-Fall-Back-Day Day

If this year was 2006, today would have been the day of the time change. Since it is not 2006, however, today was not time change day, and the people of this great nation got up and got out to church at the right time.

Except for the people at the Jones residence.

You see, in the year 2005 or so, I had the brilliant idea of purchasing an alarm clock that sets itself automatically based on radio signals from the atomic clocks. Of course, this clock needs to know two things in order to have the correct time: which time zone it is in, and whether daylight-saving time is in effect. Easy enough; when you first get the clock, you set the time zone yourself, and then the clock knows what day DST occurs. No problem, right?

EXCEPT when freaking Congress changes the date of DST for the first time in my entire LIFETIME. Apparently what was good for the USA for every year between 1966 and 2006 was just no longer sufficient.

And our alarm clock has the dates of DST hard-coded into it.

Why not, right? I mean, it's been that way for forty years! (Okay, well, not exactly the same... but the same since the 1980s, anyway.) What were the chances that it would suddenly change within the lifetime of a digital clock from Wal-Mart? Well, apparently I rolled the dice and lost... not only does my clock change at the wrong time, but you can't shut the DST feature off, and you can't reconfigure the date. So now not only do I have to reset my clock on the weekends that everyone else has to do it, but I have to reset it on two other weekends, too! I have it on my Google calendar, and I've always remembered every time after the first time... but not today. Today I got up at 9:00 and thought it was 8:00 until I looked at my wristwatch. D'OH!!!

I was able to get ready in time, and so was Mikey. No such luck for Cathy and Hannah... they didn't make it today. I recorded the message on my MP3 player, so I'm listening to it with Cathy now. :)

Big change for the Jones family

Some of our friends know this already and some don't, but I want to make sure everyone gets word so people don't find out secondhand and wonder what's going on. This week Cathy and I decided to say goodbye to Grace Church as "home" and shop around for a new church. A few more details are in this post on my other blog, and if you're interested please look over there, but I do want to make it clear that we're not angry at anyone. We have taken this action with a lot of prayer and with peace in our hearts. We love our friends at Grace and will miss you VERY much, so email us or call us or write on our Facebook wall or whatever, and say hi!

Don't miss that other blog post if you're still curious.

Around and around

A few days I uploaded a couple hundred pictures from our camera to Flickr; I haven't had time to caption them properly yet, but in the meantime, here are a few pictures of Mikey and Hannah on the carousel at Grace Church this past May!


All of the carousel pictures

Bonus picture: Hannah on the carousel a year earlier (July 2008):

Weekend Notes

Friday night was Halloween... we went to the dollar movie to see WALL·E. Mikey really loved it! I thought the first act went kind of slow for small children and I could see how it might lose their interest. Mikey loved the part where WALL·E ran over his cockroach friend, and then the cockroach popped back up with a squeaky sound. That and the part where the babies were learning their ABC's with corporate brainwashing made the movie for him. Go figure! After we went to Baskin-Robbins and ate ice cream so we could be sure everybody would go to bed with a sugar rush and nobody would get any sleep. So that was awesome. (It's Halloween... if your blood isn't like 85% glucose, you're not doing it right!)

Saturday Mikey's team did not win their soccer game; they lost 0-2. The game was in the morning; that afternoon Mikey and I went out to the place we call "The Big Circle." Take a look at this map to see why we call it that:


View Larger Map

Anyway, he and I went out to The Big Circle, which is only a couple of blocks from our house, to shoot a little air-driven rocket that Meme and Papaw gave him on his birthday (yes, we're REALLY behind on trying out birthday presents!) and (no pun intended) we had a BLAST! The rocket shoots with nothing but air power, provided by a motion that is pretty similar to clapping your hands once, and it shoots way up there into the air. The rocket is made of foam rubber, like Nerf stuff, so it's perfectly safe to try to catch it when it comes down or on the first bounce. It was a beautiful afternoon, and we had a lot of fun.

Sunday was "Super Sunday" at Grace, the one Sunday a month when we have a guest speaker. This month it was Dennis Burke, a guy that hasn't spoken to the congregation at Grace before although I think he's spoken at a minister's conference. Cathy didn't go; Hannah had a little bit of snotty-nose going on and they couldn't keep her in the nursery (which is exactly how I would want it to be, because if it were someone else's baby that looked sick, I would want Hannah to not have to be around the other baby and get sick. Church shouldn't be where your baby gets an infectious disease! ) I told Cathy I would stay home so she could go, but she wanted to stay. Anyway, it was a great message, and I hope she'll listen to it online when it goes up within a few days! (She tried to stream it live, but there was an issue with the streams yesterday and it was unwatchable.)

More Wishes And Love For Elizabeth

About a month ago I told you about our family friend and former worship leader, Elizabeth Sheehan, and how she has left that position and is pursuing other interests. This week we found out that her appendix had ruptured and she had been taken to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy! The operation was Wednesday, and last night (Thursday) we went over to the hospital and visited with her for a bit. It was funny... we went into SouthCrest Hospital where she is, and Cathy said her name to the receptionist, and she knew the room number off the top of her head. Apparently it had been non-stop partying in Elizabeth's room that day! Anyway, she was her usual sweet self, and I think she really was glad to see Mikey and Hannah. Her friend Jen picked up Hannah and didn't give her back until we had to leave.

So we just want to extend our good wishes to Elizabeth again. We know that tons of prayer has gone up for her quick recovery, and we also know she's strong and depends on the Lord and she'll be back on her feet before you know it. To update the previous post a bit, Elizabeth has now completely left her duties at Grace, including volunteer duties in the Worship Arts Ministry; we'd like to say again that we have nothing but confidence that her future is brighter than ever, and we are so excited to see what God is going to use her for next!

Elizabeth - we love you!

I almost didn't blog this because it's not technically a "family" thing, but Elizabeth is so close to being part of our family that I think it's important to document what we found out last night.

Elizabeth Sheehan, who has been the Worship Arts Department director and has led worship at Grace Church for 4 years is stepping down from the position. There's nothing scandalous going on; in fact, Elizabeth is actually staying around as a volunteer. We don't know all of the "why"s, and I wouldn't post them publicly even if we did, but I know in my heart that it's a decision that was made with a lot of prayer and not made lightly.

Elizabeth was almost singlehandedly the reason that Cathy and I got back into the choir at Grace when we came back from a year at another church. Cathy saw things in Elizabeth... particularly her kind heart and open attitude... that made Cathy feel comfortable with the idea of joining back up. I would not have joined without Cathy. And boy, are we glad we did! Our lives would be so different now if we hadn't come back into the choir; I can't even hope to be able to enumerate all the ways. Most of our closest friends now are from WAM. My renewed interest in songwriting happened because of our involvement, and one of my songs has actually been used in an actual service! Elizabeth rejoiced with us when Hannah was born, and cried and prayed with and for us when we miscarried before Hannah and when we lost Cathy's mother a few years ago. Mikey almost treats her like a favorite aunt, and although Hannah is kind of little to say what she's thinking, I think she loves Elizabeth too. Cathy and I both see her almost like a sister; definitely as a treasured friend. We have such respect for her as a Believer and as a musician, and if she does ever eventually leave Grace for good, we will sorely miss her. I think Cathy is already steeling herself for not hearing Elizabeth's voice leading worship every Sunday.

Elizabeth, we love you very much. We know you have GREAT things in store for you!

(Below is the bio of Elizabeth from the church Web site before it disappears to make way for the new directors' information. I just thought we'd like to preserve it for posterity!)

Elizabeth Sheehan likes to call herself a “product” of Grace Church. She has been a member of Grace Church all but the first 8 months of her life.  After graduating from Grace Christian School in 1999, she acquired a bachelor degree in international business from Oklahoma State University and a diploma from School of the Local Church (now GSM) with an emphasis in music ministry.  She began her volunteer ministry in the fine arts areas of the children’s ministry.  From there, she became actively involved in music in Edge Youth (formerly Frontline) in secondary school and stayed involved as a youth leader throughout college.  During this decade of her life, her love to see the world won to Jesus grew as did her “addiction” to short-term mission trips, particularly to Spanish-speaking countries.  She continued volunteering until God called her into leadership in the Worship Arts Department in the main service.

The Week In Review

WOW... this week has been eventful! I've been meaning all week to post something about last weekend, and not having time, particularly because I wanted to include some pictures and they were on the camera and not on the computer!

Last Friday something kind of cool happened at our friends Jerry & Shelley's house. They had invited Mike Sheehan, an older guy that sings in the choir with us, to share about hsi recent missions trip to Argentina. The place was pretty packed, and we didn't help alleviate that: we brought Mikey and Hannah right along with us! Everyone wanted to play with Hannah, including our friend Rhonda:



...and Hannah's little friend Alivia:



We really enjoyed Mike's stories about his trip, and we even got to see some video of some of the congregations and places (it's on the laptop behind Mike's head):



The next morning we kind of relaxed and didn't do much. Hannah and I got in some practice time on the old keyboard:



Actually, it was supposed to be me getting some piano practice in, but Hannah always wants to be doing what Daddy's doing! I actually did participate in the ORU alumni day of prayer and fasting, praying for ORU and specifically for a few current ORU students I know. I didn't go to the service at 6... actually, I didn't quite make it to 6 with my fast. At about 2:30 I realized that I was suffering through for the sake of suffering through and that my fasting wasn't driving me to prayer, but actually was distracting me from everything. So I resolved to last until 3, and that's what I did. Then I had a snack!

Sunday morning Cathy wasn't feeling well, so Mikey and I went to church stag. Mikey had forgotten his Nintendo DS, but I had the camera on me so I let him take pictures during sound check. The pictures are a little dark, but here's the whole set. And here's the one Mr. Robert tried to talk me into deleting within seconds of when Mikey took it:



That Mr. Robert! He's a fun guy!

My mom and dad usually pick up Mikey and Hannah after Sunday school so they don't have to wait for us to get done singing in second service, so they picked up Mikey and took him home. Unbeknownst to me, they took him to my home instead of theirs, so I showed up at their house and found nobody at the house but Sky Captain in the back yard:



(Hmm... maybe I should Photoshop that sidewalk a bit...)

It was Super Sunday at church, and Mario Murillo spoke in both the morning and evening services. It was really great stuff! If you want to know more about what happened Sunday morning, you'll have to read this post on my other blog.

Monday was Mikey's first den meeting with his new Cub Scout den, Den 1 of Pack 137. We've been to a pack activity already, but this was the first den meeting. They actually completed almost a whole achievement in their Bear books! They fingerprinted themselves and they did plaster casts of their feet (Mikey's plaster cast didn't turn out, but maybe some of them worked out better). The meeting was at Mayo Demonstration School, which I had never been inside although I've driven past it hundreds of times. I thought it was a really cool place; there are barely any walls in the whole building. It looks like much of it is one big library/classroom, although we were in a traditionally-sized room where they have art classes. Afterward all the kids went out onto the playground out back... one of the mothers told me that they kids love to go to school there and sometimes don't want to go home! We tried to get Mikey in there when he was going into Kindergarten, but we didn't get in. Pity; he would have loved it! But he's enjoying being in home school this year... which of course is another post...

Tuesday I auditioned for an acting role in this year's Christmas production at Grace. I've read the script a bunch of times, since we were working on some original music for it in WIT meetings, and I had so much fun reading through the script that I thought I'd try out for a part. Besides, we didn't get to be in the program last year... there were extenuating circumstances! So I guess maybe this year I'm making up for that. I love Christmas!

WHEW... after all that news, it's good to have a few days of the same old grind! Church Wednesday night with choir practice after, Thursday night we actually watched The Incredibles at home (that's SUCH a great movie!). Today Cathy and Mikey and Hannah are going shopping for some fall clothing, and I don't think we have any big plans for tonight. Tomorrow, however, is a BIG deal... not only do Mikey and I get to go to Lowe's and make a pirate ship, but Cathy gets to go see American Idols Live at the new BOK Center! And Grace Church is starting up the new Saturday evening services this weekend. If it wasn't for American Idols Live, I'd go to the first one, just to see how it went!

But the really SUPER big weekend will be next weekend. I'll tell you what happened as soon as I figure out which of the three or four things that are scheduled that we decide to do!

Mother's Day Weekend 2008

What a crazy weekend!

Saturday Mikey had an 8am soccer game... Cathy and Hannah don't do 8am if they can help it so it was me and him for the game.
Mikey's team: THUNDER!My brother Kevin and his family had come in the night before, but I was pretty sure they would still be sleeping so we didn't bother them that early (Kevin knew about it, so if he had been awake he could have come out... but I think he was wiped out). After the game Mikey and I stopped by Wal-Mart to see what we could find for Cathy and for my mom for Mother's Day. We got Cathy the new Bo Bice CD (she loves it... it's pretty close to classic Southern rock, kind of Black Crowes-ish) and the Randy Jackson project (which is kind of a mixed bag of pop, R&B, and the odd token rap song and country song thrown in for good measure... I don't know yet how she likes that one), and my mom got the movie Game Plan which she really loved in the theater. Mikey picked out a pair of earrings for each, and we were all done with our shopping.

So then we went over to Mom's house, where my brother and his rather sizable family were hanging out.
The oh-so-photogenic MackieWhen we got there we found my mom & dad, Kevin, his wife Candi, their five girls Elizabeth, Emily, Eden, Eliah, and Evonleigh (yes, they do get harder to spell as you go along, and no, I'm not positive I spelled the last one right!), mom's dogs Caesar and Sky Captain, and my brother's dog Mackie. Needless to say, it was either a party waiting to happen or a disaster waiting to happen! Add me and Mikey into the mix and that makes it that much more interesting! (Later that afternoon another guy with a few more Afghan Hounds arrived... talk about craziness happening!!)

But we weren't there too long at that point, because, we decided to take the kids to go build a project at Lowe's. We took them to the location where we usually take Mikey... 15th & Yale... but we hadn't pre-registered and they didn't have six projects available; they only had three. So Kevin and Dad stayed with three of the kids, and I took Mikey, Elizabeth and Emily down to the 71st Street store, where they had plenty of kits and where the store employee really went above and beyond the call of duty to make it fun for the kids. Everybody got to make a "Memory Box" for Mother's Day (a little wooden box with a slot to put in movie tickets or pictures or whatever other scraps of paper that'll make Mama cry when she opens the box and looks at them later!) and we went back to the house.

I called Cathy, who was still at home, and she got ready to come over. Candi wanted to take her shopping and buy a birthday present for her. Mikey played with his cousins and I hung out until Cathy called, then I went over and picked up my two girls and we came on back. Candi and Cathy went shopping and everybody else just kind of hung out...
Mikey's new game & DS gearMikey got a new Nintendo DS game from Kevin & family for his birthday, so he was alternating playing that game and playing with his cousins, who he adores. The grown-ups mostly kind of sat around in various states of almost-asleep and totally-asleep for a while (Kevin went back to bed), until I realized it was 15 minutes to 4. Mikey had a birthday party to go to at 4:30 on the other side of town at Incredible Pizza... and Cathy was out with our car! We tried to call her cell phone, and we tried to call Candi's, but neither one answered. Girls and shopping, SHEESH. When I saw Cathy, I was like, HEY didn't get that cell phone for EMERGENCIES? But it turns out the girls were already watching the clock and they got back at just the right time.

So my three and I took off for Troy's birthday party at Incredible Pizza. They've changed the party deal a little since we had Mikey's birthday there a couple of years ago... now instead of kind of doing party games and stuff with the kids and then turning them loose with a $5 game card, they basically rent you the room for an hour, and then they turn each kid loose with a game card good for one hour of unlimited games! How cool is that? Mikey played and played and wound up earning like 840 tickets, which is enough for a pretty respectable prize. He got this unusual triangular single-strap backpack thing, and a little UNO game with these tiny little cards, and a little blue WWJD bear and a red mini frisbee.

When we went back to Mom & Dad's after the birthday party,
Hannah and her brother (via
video) at the same age!nobody was there... they had gone shopping or something... so we went on home. Hannah had at some point come down with a low-grade fever which was a job for baby Tylenol or something (Cathy called the doctor and got instructions) so we didn't have to bring her in, but it's probably better that she got home and got to bed. Because of singing in the 8:30am service every Sunday, Saturday nights have a bedtime like school nights anyway.

So all night Saturday night, Cathy was up and down with Hannah, dosing her with medicine as appropriate and comforting her as needed. In the morning she decided to stay home with the baby, even though it was Mother's Day... so Mikey gave her the gift and we went on to church. Worship was awesome, and Robb, guest speaking in Pastor Bob's absence, was great as always. My mom picked up Mikey after the first service (I stayed on for the music in the second service, as we usually do) and he went with the whole crew to Fish Daddy's. After church I went home to get Cathy and Hannah, and we went to pick up Mikey, who was now at my mom's house, so we could go to dinner with HIS mother! We went to The Cheesecake Factory and got some dinner (we went around 4 or so, and it really wasn't crowded at all when we got there, although by the time we left it had started to fill up a bit), and then after that, since the fam from Texas was on their way home, we went home and played some Disney Scene-It, pulled out some video of Mikey as a newborn (in honor of Mother's Day, of course!), and then crashed.

WHEW! What a weekend! I think I need a nap.

Tornado Alley

Wednesday nights are church nights for us. We probably would go anyway... I went on Wednesday nights long before I joined the choir at Grace (it's very healthy to have a little bit of Word and fellowship in the middle of the week)... but now we pretty much have to go because we have choir practice immediately after the service. Tonight Cathy wasn't feeling well, though, so Mikey and I went on to church while she and Hannah stayed home. On the way there the weather looked pretty average, but little did we know there was something really brewing! Church started at 7, and maybe 15 or 20 minutes into the service, right in the middle of one of the songs, Pastor Geof, who was supposed to speak while Pastor Bob is away on a missions trip to the Ukraine and a couple of other places, stopped the service and told us that tornadoes were headed right our direction, and that we should all calmly move into the tornado-shelter children's building. A few minutes earlier Cathy had called my mom (who was sitting next to me) and told her that the tornado sirens were going off at our house, which is about nine miles to the North of the church. I wound up with my mom and dad and a bunch of friends from choir in the 5-year-old classroom, not really knowing exactly where Mikey was but knowing he was being safely taken care of in another one of the tornado shelter rooms (he was). Cathy wound up in the closet at home, probably squeezing Hannah so hard her eyes bugged out. Down in the classroom where I was, we basically picked back up where we left off and sang a bunch more praise choruses. The tornadoes apparently missed the church and the house both, and service and rehearsal were both canceled. Without the storms, about this time we would be in the middle of choir practice... but instead I'm at home blogging. God took care of us!

UPDATE: another account of the same incident from another dad who goes to Grace here.

Movies & Kids

So... what's the deal with showing movies to my kid?

Mikey just turned eight years old. My wife and I try to keep some control over the media he sees. We carefully consider the movies we let him watch... for example, some friends of ours want to go see Iron Man this weekend with us, but we want to check our "family movie review sites" list (see below for the list) so we'll know what we're up against before we take him to see it. Although he had already seen all of the other Star Wars movies, we pre-screened and thought long and hard about Revenge of the Sith before we took him to see it because of Anakin, you know, bursting into flames and all. (We ultimately took him, and he loved it... and no nightmares afterward. he understood the good/evil aspects of it, I think.) I cringe every time a new Shrek movie comes out because of the slightly off-color jokes and homosexual double entendres. At home we have a special DVD player that we can use to seamlessly "clean up" things that we wouldn't approve of him watching without compromising the movie's story (think: automatic "network TV" version). He knows which shows on TV that he's not allowed to watch, and if one of them comes on he won't watch it (yep, he's a great kid!) Grandparents ask our permission to let him watch movies. And yet still he sees things that we wouldn't approve of. How is this possible?

This morning Mikey told me that he saw Horton Hears a Who! at school. I was incredulous... is that even out on DVD? I asked him if it was the computer-animated one like Ice Age or the cartoon one like the old How The Grinch Stole Christmas. He told me enough detail that I'm convinced that he actually did see the 2008 theatrical version... we haven't even seen it as a family, so I actually had to look it up and find some obscure details to ask him about (he knew them). I looked it up on Amazon.com... you can't buy it on DVD yet. Sometimes you can rent movies before you can buy them... he tells me the teacher said she rented it. His teacher is not the "illegally downloading movies off the Internet" type, so I have to believe she got it legitimately somehow. But how? (Maybe she had a wonderful, awful idea... oh wait. That's the wrong Dr. Seuss story...)

The first time I learned that Mikey was seeing movies at school was when he told me they had watched Transformers. That movie was one I actually specifically wanted to avoid letting him see because of some sexually-suggestive things in the movie. When the movie had just come out, my brother IMd me one day and told me he had seen the movie and it was great. (This was before I had read up on it.) "Cool! Someone else told me they liked it," I said. "Nothing bad for the kiddies, then?" His reply was: "woah...no, I didn't say take Mikey. I said it rocked." My brother is no prude, but even he cautioned me on that movie. And yet they apparently watched it at Mikey's Christian school, presumably with masturbation jokes and other and sexual humor intact. Something is weird here. (For the record, we probably would have watched it at home eventually with the Clearplay DVD player, but that's neither here nor there.)

They watch movies on special occasions at church, too. Once a month we have a special service on a Sunday night, and often they run long, so in the children's church they'll show a movie. A year or so ago when I first found out about this I asked our children's pastor if he could let the parents know what movie was coming up in case it was something we didn't approve of. He told me that he carefully pre-screens every movie and they're all OK. So no early notices of what movie is coming up have materialized. Now, it's my church, my "family", so in general I'm very comfortable with what is considered appropriate or not, but this is my kid here. Wouldn't it be courteous to let me know about something as potentially controversial as a movie showing?

(I won't even go into the fact that every DVD on the market has a incarceration-serious warning that it is illegal to show the DVD in public.)

Worse is the fact that the good folks at Mikey's church and at his school (and they are good folks) apparently have not considered the possibility that even if I do approve of the movie, maybe I would like to share that movie-viewing experience with my son instead of him seeing the movie for the first time with someone else. I suppose by the time something is out on DVD presumably people have gone to see it in movie theaters, but often we don't financially have the luxury of paying $20-25 to see something in a theater when we could wait three months and get it for $5 from Blockbuster, or sometimes free from the library.

So I appear to have more or less lost control of my child's movie-viewing experiences. I knew this would happen eventually, but I kind of hoped for it to be when his age had reached the double digits. Maybe I'm old-fashioned... the first time I saw an R-rated movie I was in college and went with friends, and if I had realized ahead of time that it was R-rated I probably wouldn't have watched it. But it seems like the people I trust with my little boy could have a little more respect for my discretion about something like that.

My list of family movie review sites:
Plugged In movies section - from Focus on the Family
Christian Spotlight on Entertainment movies section
Kids-In-Mind
Screen It! Movie Reviews - used to be more useful before they went to a subscriber model, but still some good info

By glancing through the information on these four sites, you can know basically anything that is going to happen in a movie that might surprise, embarrass, or otherwise upset you if your kids see it. You will also know almost everything about the movie's basic plot and you may run into spoilers, so if you prefer to be surprised, better just go pre-screen it yourself.

You might also want to look up some movies you've watched that you consider "okay" to get some perspective. You might find that some of these sites are less relaxed about content than you are. You also might be shocked to see how corrupt some of the stuff in kid movies looks when you consider it in the light of day instead of the dark of a theater!

Mom's Month

You know, sometimes something really important slips through the cracks. The month of March was a big deal for someone very special to me and my wife and kids... Meme!


first place winners
In late March, Meme (my mom) got a phone call from someone at the Tulsa Libraries. She had entered an essay in their 2008 Adult Creative Writing Contest, and she won first place! The picture above is all the winners, taken after the awards ceremony on April 6... click through to Flickr if you want to see their names.

Anyway, her essay was about her work as a Tulsa Police Department chaplain. Another thing that was due in part to her work with the Tulsa Police happened on March 11... in a small informal ceremony with Pastor Bob, Geoff Jackson and about a dozen friends and family members, my mom was ordained as a minister by Grace Church. We were all so proud! (I didn't take any still pictures... I shot video of the ceremony but don't have an easy way to upload it.)

Congratulations, Meme, and congratulations again! Now that it's April, how are you going to top March?

Dedicated

Today we brought Hannah up to the front of our church and got our pastor to pray over her. We don't believe in infant baptism or christening or whatever, but we do bring our babies up to kind of introduce them to the church and then Pastor Bob and Ms. Loretta lay hands on them and pray for them and for their families, that the children will lead safe lives and be raised according to the Word of God, and that when the time comes, that they will come to know Jesus as their Savior. This morning when we were getting ready for church I played the cassette tape of Mikey's dedication (eight years ago, Mother's Day!) for Mikey, and then we went off to choir sound check.

Cathy and I sang in the first service as usual, and then after Sunday School my mom went and got Hannah dressed in the pretty dress you can see in the pictures.

Five babies... a bumper crop!

Cathy sat out the choir part of second service, and I was going to sit out as well but it turned out Cathy had saved one too few seats! So I ran up to the backstage door and got there just in time. Mikey was in the service with us, and so were my mom and dad. They have baby dedications immediately after the music, so I high-tailed it off the stage and walked up with Cathy (they apparently don't allow big brothers up on the stage... just the mommies and daddies and babies! ) and Pastor Bob prayed with us. Honestly, she and I were both praying along so hard that we don't remember a word he said, except that Cathy remembers him using the word "demand" because it startled her! I hope they give us a tape or CD like they did with Mikey!

Hannah catching a snooze


Mikey catching a cookie

Anyway, after that we went to Target... Cathy had made an appointment with the Target portrait studio to take pictures of Hannah and Mikey together. We were a little early, so we went down to the snack bar to get some lunch... Hannah promptly fell asleep, as you can see. When it was our turn we woke her up and went down to the studio and got some really cute pictures done; maybe once our prints come I'll be able to post a few. Afterward we stopped my Meme's house to tell her thanks for her help, then we came home and had some dinner. We had some time before bedtime so I recommended that we watch something we had recorded on the DVR. This weekend we already watched The Game Plan and Kronk's New Groove which both have pretty strong fathers-and-children themes, so I recommended that we watch a good mommies-and-babies movie... Dumbo. Actually this time through I was a little startled by the racial stereotypes in the movie... afterward we discussed that with Mikey a bit. Plus, how do you explain bottle of stuff that got into Dumbo's water and made him see those pink elephants?? But besides those things (neither of which bothered Mikey anyway because he didn't even know what was going on!) we all enjoyed the movie a lot.

Boy, though, we have GOT to quit having such big weekends. It takes me all week to rest up from them!



Yes, I agree... she IS the cutest baby in the universe!

Happy Easter 2008

Mikey got this dinosaur at the Grace Church Eggstravaganza 2008. I snapped this picture of the menacing fellow while I waited for Mikey to finish collecting his second basket of candy. Mikey named him "Paddy" after I explained that although most people call this kind of dinosaur a Brontosaurus, the actual name of this kind of critter is Apatosaurus (you learn all kinds of useless stuff when your daddy is a bookish nerd... maybe Mikey will get this as his $1,000,000 question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire one day). Anyway, "Paddy" is short for "Apatosaurus," although since Mikey got him/her the day before St. Paddy's Day gives it even more appropriateness.

Happy Easter!

Us At Volunteer Banquet

In the process of looking for pictures of the Eggstravaganza, I found the pictures of the Grace Church Volunteers Banquet!


Michael & Cathy at Grace Church Volunteer Banquet - March 9, 2008

If you are a member of Grace Church but do not volunteer or haven't been to an annual banquet yet... volunteer in service to God, but the banquet is a really nice thank-you! You get to relax and visit with the people you've worked shoulder-to-shoulder with all year, and you even get to cheer for your department (some of which cheer louder than others... for example - Youth department volunteers: "YAY!!!!!!!" Offering counter volunteers: "(yay?)" ) Anyway, it's loads of fun and the food is generally really tasty.

Eggstravaganza 2008

Can you find Mikey in the blue jacket?On Palm Sunday we had our annual "Eggstravaganza" at Grace Church (see official pictures here). The little kids' choir that Cathy and I have been directing (five mighty singers for the Lord!) sang a couple of songs (namely "Lord, I Lift Your Name On High" and "Father, I Adore You") and then we had the "Easter Egg Hunt", which in practice is more like an "Easter Candy Footrace". They throw a bunch of candy out on the baseball field behind the church and let the kids go crazy! It was a lot of fun... Mikey always has a blast! He was one of the first to get out to the field from the auditorium, and as you can see in the picture to the right, he got out into the candy area pretty quickly when they said "go!" Can you find him? (Click here to go to Flickr if you can't... mouse over the picture and you'll spot him easily!) And if you visit this blog on Easter, you'll get to meet the new critter friend he made when he ran out on the field!

Unfortunately, because Hannah was still recovering from her procedure, she and Cathy didn't make it out. Maybe looking at the pictures will help Cathy feel more like she was there!

Max wants to come in
and go crazy!

Holy Knitting

Hannah's "first baby picture"

After Mikey was born, we waited a couple of years to have another... circumstances of our life intruded and he was probably five years old before we felt like we could go ahead and start trying for another child. Unfortunately, things didn't go as smoothly for us as we could have hoped... we had several early-term miscarriages and we even consulted with a couple of fertility doctors, who prescribed treatments that are expensive and that were not covered by our insurance. Each time we got pregnant, Cathy got so excited that she would begin to tell people within a week or two after home-testing positive, only to be later disappointed when the pregnancy terminated. I tried to convince her to keep it under her hat for a month or so until we were sure that the pregnancy was going to "take," but she couldn't help it... she kept letting it get out, and then we would have to explain what had happened to people.

Ultimately we left it in God's hands, and finally a pregnancy happened that went well. After a month or so even I was comfortable enough to "go public" with it, and we told all of our friends in our church choir, in the church children's department where Mikey goes to his classes and where we volunteer, family members, everybody. It was very exciting! Cathy was experiencing morning sickness, which is generally considered a good sign of a strong pregnancy, so we were really excited but we still asked Sunday school friends and other friends to pray for things to go smoothly. I remember one Sunday morning Cathy had stayed home from church, I believe because of the queasiness, and we were praying for her in Sunday school. One woman who sometimes has visions when she is praying said out loud to me, "I just see God making something like a cloth, kind of weaving a piece of cloth." OK, I thought, isn't THAT random. But I trust this woman and I believe she hears from God, so when I got home I told Cathy what she had said. When she heard it, Cathy got a sort of stricken look on her face, and said to me "All morning I've been thinking of the verse where it says that God knits us together in our mother's womb."

In a book I am reading, Philip Yancey repeats a quote from Albert Einstein that "Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous." I haven't been able to uncover evidence that A.E. actually did say that, but I suppose there is probably some truth in it. I don't think that this was coincidence; I consider it one of the clearest words of prophecy I've ever experienced in my life. It encouraged us a great deal about that pregnancy.

The pregnancy which, a few weeks later, spontaneously ended in miscarriage.

So how do you handle something like that? We felt strongly that we had heard from God, and yet what He had said to us appeared to have not come to pass. We were of course devastated once again, but we continued to believe that God was working in our best interests. And we continued to wonder about that prophetic word which had not happened.

Within months, we were pregnant again. This pregnancy carried to term (well, not technically to term, but you know that story already) and sweet little Hannah was the result. Are we sad about the miscarriages? Yes. Does that lessen our happiness and thankfulness for Hannah? Definitely not!

So what about that word of prophecy?

The cap is crocheted, not knitted, but you get the idea.

Well... it seems like a lot of times with prophecy, what you think it means is not always what it does mean. I think when God brought that Scripture passage to our memory, we thought what He was saying was that the pregnancy that was happening at that time was the one that was going to carry through to birth. In retrospect, I think what God was saying though His Word was that He was in control. When the baby came along, it would be because He had "knit" her for us, not because we had done anything right or wrong. God's provision is not something we demand, and it's not something we get because we prayed right. We pray and ask; the Word tells us that is what we should do. But ultimately God knows best how to provide for His children, and he answers prayers in His way.