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!

Jellystone Park

"I forgot the camera."

Those are the words I said to Cathy yesterday as we left the city limits of Tulsa, and that's why you won't see pictures of us with John & Sheri at Jellystone Park Camp in Eufaula, Oklahoma. But I'm not sure we would have gotten that many pictures anyway... we spent most of the day in the water, and our little snapshot camera is most definitely not waterproof!

We didn't go to camp... you can pick up a day pass for ten bucks apiece and use the facilities for the whole day without spending a night. John & Sheri had discovered the place somehow, and we had a GREAT time with them. Mikey and Hannah loved the pool (Hannah was wearing a floating suit, so she even got to go in the "deep end"... a whopping five feet!), and after we had splashed around there for a while (and got to dance the Macarena and the chicken dance and eat free ice cream... POOL PARTY!!!), we went on down to the lake swimming area, where the water gets a little deeper and where they have paddle boats, kayaks, a huge inflatable water slide and a smaller plastic slide, and a trampoline right out there in the lake. Awesome! Mikey and Sheri snagged a paddle boat while John and I swam out to the water slide, and they promptly ran over a life jacket which was floating in the water (presumably whoever had been in the jacket was on the shore somewhere and it blew out into the lake... I hope!) and so it was almost impossible to paddle the thing. Crazy! Hannah wasn't liking the muddy water, so she and Cathy went back to the pool. John and I went down the water slide, forgetting that unless you want muddy water up your sinuses, you should hold your nose when you go down a monster slide into the lake!

So anyway, we joined Mikey and Sheri on the paddle boat and managed to get back to shore. Sheri joined Cathy at the pool while Mikey snagged a kayak. Mikey and John and I went out to the trampoline; we discovered that a trampoline on water is a weird thing. The water absorbs some of the bounce, so it's a lot harder to jump. So we didn't jump for very long!

We joined the girls back at the pool and splashed a little longer, then we dried off and took a break to go across the street to Watts' Barbecue, a restaurant which is apparently somewhat legendary and which is owned by the family of former U.S. Representative J. C. Watts. It was good stuff! Afterward we went back to the campground and tried out the mini-golf course, but it was really hot and except for Mikey, who finished the whole course without us, our hears weren't particularly in it... the grown-ups and Hannah quit halfway through. :)

They have tent sites and cabins out there, and it would be a GREAT place to camp out! We may yet do that sometime, but the day pass was a great, inexpensive day with family and friends. Despite using waterproof sunscreen, each of us wound up with varying levels of sunburn... but we all had a great time!