Jasmine Moran Children's Museum

Last Saturday we took a day trip to Seminole, Oklahoma to visit the Jasmine Moran Children's Museum. We had a great time, as you can see from these pictures:

     
     
     

Usually I try to give a synopsis of what all went on in these blog posts, but in this case, the pictures are so central to the story that I sort of blogged in the individual photo descriptions. The real blog entry lives almost entirely on Flickr! You really should go there and take a look at each picture individually... it's easy on Flickr to enter a photo set and click "Next" on each page and go all the way through it. This is one case where the official Web site doesn't do the real place justice.

Click this picture of the museum's welcome sign to see all of the pictures and read the photo captions to see all the things we did:

Visit to Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum

Saturday we took Mikey to the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum for the first time. Actually, we've been to the memorial once before; several years ago we were in OKC for something else and we stopped and saw the memorial. At the time, Mikey was old enough to understand what had happened but we weren't sure he was old enough to not get scared (and he was almost certainly not old enough to remember afterward), so we decided to wait for later. Yesterday was later! Mikey's nine years old now... plenty old enough to understand and process the information in the museum.

Most of the people who will read this already know what the memorial/museum is about, but just for anyone who wasn't as close to it as most of our family and friends were... the memorial is on the site of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, which was destroyed in April of 1995 by two terrorists from our own country. The put 4,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate explosives into a rented Ryder truck, parked it outside of the federal building, and detonated it at 9:02am on April 19th, killing 168 people and wounding several hundred more. At the time it happened, it was the worst case of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.

We arrived shortly after lunchtime. We didn't really want to go into the memorial grounds to eat our sack lunch, so we sat just outside the memorial on a bench next to the street and had our sandwiches. Cathy and I had forgotten, but we figured it out as we ate, that we were a few feet from the "survivor wall"... the only section of the destroyed building that was left standing (the building was so badly damaged by the blast that it was demolished a month after the bombing, but that one wall was left standing). The entrance to the memorial park on the side where we were is stairs only (there is a ramp on the other side, a block away), so we walked down the street twenty yards or so and entered near the "survivor tree." This tree was in the parking lot across the street from the federal building when the bomb went off. There are aerial photographs of the area from the 1920s that show this tree already there even back then, so the tree was over 70 years old at the time of the blast. The blast was so powerful that cars that were parked around the tree were demolished and caught on fire, and the building on the other side of the parking lot had its roof blown off and the bricks of the wall facing the federal building were physically separated... but the survivor tree is still there, alive today. It's quite a symbol for people who escaped with their lives that day, and the families that did not.

I won't try to tell you everything about what happened that day in 1995, and I won't even try to tell you everything about the memorial itself; you can get that information from Wikipedia, or from the memorial's own Web site. I'll tell you that the whole museum is arranged like a time line, starting at 6am, the way someone who was there that day might start the story ("It was an ordinary, beautiful spring day that morning...") and then continuing on all the way to the capture of the two perpetrators, and then through the history of the creating of the memorial and museum. The things that got me the most were the room where they have an actual audio recording of the blast (it's the taped record of a hearing that was going on at the time it happened) and the little room with the pictures of all of the people who were killed. There were some pretty amazing stories, too... a lady who was in a meeting when it happened, and all of her coworkers just disappeared from sight. A woman who walked away from the building dazed but unscathed, called herself a taxi, went to the airport, got on a plane, slept on the flight, and didn't even know what had happened until she got where she was going and saw it on the news. A doctor who saved a woman from dying in the rubble by amputating her trapped leg... with a pocketknife! Amazing stories. Hannah has no idea what was going on, but she was very good for a 21-month-old who was having to sit in a stroller for two hours. Mikey involved himself in the exhibit more than I expected; at several points he was really engrossed in a video or an exhibit. Afterward we walked across the streets to see small memorials set up by the churches on either side of the site, and then we went on home. (Hannah fell asleep in the car, so she got her nap.)

It was fun being together. It was fun learning about something new (newer to Mikey than to Cathy and me, but new nonetheless). It's not a fun subject to think about, but it was a terrific family outing. It was a great way to spend a pretty Saturday!

BFW (Big Fun Weekend)

Wow... what an unexpectedly full weekend!

Saturday after building a Mr. Potatohead-style pumpkinhead with Papaw Jones at Lowe's and going to Mikey's soccer game (which his team won 3-0... no shootout this week!), he and I went home and had a little downtime with Hannah while Mama made a grocery run, and then we all went out to a pumpkin patch. Out there Cathy picked out a couple of little pumpkins for the kids to have for I don't know, Pumpkin Season or something (hey, aren't those supposed to rise out of the pumpkin patch on their own?). Mikey got to slide down the giant blowup slide they had out there, while Hannah and I discovered a ride of her own... leaning the stroller aaaaaaaalllllll the way back until Hannah's head is almost on the ground WOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!! and then tilting back forward WOOOOOOOOOO! hehehehehe. (That last hehe was Hannah giggling when the stroller is back level.) After that we had dinner at the revived-again Casa Bonita on 21st & Sheridan and then went over to Papaw Angel's house for a bit and Mikey got to hang out with his little black dog Skipper. Mikey is sometimes nervous around dogs that are excitable, and Skipper is one of those super-friendly dogs that just wants to be all up in your business. Papaw has been in the habit of locking Skip up in his carrier whenever Mikey comes over, but this time Mikey and Skipper got to have some quality time together and I don't think Mikey's scared at all now.

Sunday we actually skipped out on the second service (BOOOO ON US!!!) to blow out of town to OKC to visit the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. Mikey has been studying cowboys in his schoolwork, and the museum was actually mentioned in the curriculum. I had mentioned it to Cathy as a good location for a "field trip" quite some time ago, but it didn't sink in until it actually came up in the curriculum. Anyway, we went on out and had a great time! Mikey especially liked the "Children's Corral" area and the huge beautiful garden out back (the weather could hardly have been more perfect, although it was kind of windy... it was sunny and warm enough to be comfortable but not sweaty), and he particularly got a charge out of throwing twigs into the little strem they have running through the garden area and watching it go over the mini waterfalls. Not that cowboy-ish, but definitely kid-ish! His other favorite part is the little Western town, "Prosperity Junction", that is actually inside the museum. You can go inside most of the buildings and see antiques from the Old West, and kind of get a flavor of how it might have been back then. I've been to something similar at the East Texas Oil Museum, which we hope to get to visit as well once he gets to the unit on energy. Hannah enjoyed Prosperity Junction because she discovered that there was a pretty pronounced echo in the room. She kept going "AH!" and then listening for the echo. By the time we got done in Prosperity Junction she had gotten to where she would make an echo and then applaud herself... clapping her hands is a new thing she's picked up recently. We also went through the areas about old-time and modern cowboy life, Western heroes in entertainment, rodeo, the army, and more. Oh... did I mention the several HUMONGOUS statues that they have in the place? I kept seeing pictures of the statue of a cowboy on a horse in the entrance atrium (it's called "End of the Trail") but didn't realize how HUGE the thing is until I saw a picture of it with people next to it! It's amazing, as are the other beautiful statues in the place.


Anyway, we had the perfect amount of time to take in the museum, and then we stopped by Cracker Barrel on the way home (to kind of maintain the cowboy theme a little!) and then came on home and went to bed. It was a great family time! We're going to research some of the other museums, in Tulsa as well as in OKC, and try and do a Saturday like this every month.