Good-bye, Lava Rock... we'll miss you.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Rest In Peace, Lava Rock
Mikey's pet toad Lava Rock has passed away. This was his first pet that he took care of all by himself; Fire-Bellied Toads aren't known for having incredibly long lifespans, so we think Lava Rock probably died of natural causes rather than foul play or neglect. Mikey got Lava Rock for Mikey's birthday last April, and he's done a good job of taking care of him, reading up on toads and learning what he could in order to make Lava Rock's life happy and comfortable. Services are planned in the back yard for 5:30pm today (or whenever I make it home from work) and interment will likely be under the big tree in the middle of the yard.
Good-bye, Lava Rock... we'll miss you.
Good-bye, Lava Rock... we'll miss you.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Rock 'N' Ribfest
Last Saturday we all went out to Rock 'N' Ribfest downtown by the BOK Center. It was also the 1-year anniversary of the BOK Center opening, so they were having a little open house where you could go in for free and see the arena. Here's a pic of Mikey eating some nachos... you can see some more pictures right here!
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Da Ma Pa Buh Ye...
Hannah has been getting better and better at talking in recent weeks. She's 21 months old now, but maybe a month or two ago she really started naming people. Don't get me wrong... before that she had been saying some words... "Ap-pool" is her favorite fruit, for example, and has been for some time. She knows the names of a lot of animals and what "sounds" they make (a favorite: any ferocious cat, be it lion or tiger or puma or leopard or whatever, says "RAAAAAR!"). But it made our hearts glad when she finally started saying "Da-da" and "Ma-ma." The next name she started saying was "Pa-pa" which warmed the hearts of both my dad and Cathy's! Now every time we pull up to one of their houses, Hannah says "Pa-pa YAAAY!" To my mom's dismay, however, Hannah always clammed up whenever she tried to get Hannah to say "Me-me." Mikey was working hard on "Mikey," too, with similar lack of success. But finally, at long last, Hannah worked out names for both of them: "Ye-ye" for my mom, and "Buh-buh" for her brother.
This week, though, Mikey has gotten an upgrade. Hannah has started calling him "Bikey" instead of "Buh-buh". So he's pretty excited about that! (Of course, he's also been training her to say "Go 'way!" just by being up in her grill all the time... so quite often we hear "Bikey! Go 'way!" ...not quite sure that's the way Mikey wanted his name to be used!)
This week, though, Mikey has gotten an upgrade. Hannah has started calling him "Bikey" instead of "Buh-buh". So he's pretty excited about that! (Of course, he's also been training her to say "Go 'way!" just by being up in her grill all the time... so quite often we hear "Bikey! Go 'way!" ...not quite sure that's the way Mikey wanted his name to be used!)
Friday, September 11, 2009
Labor Day at Meme's
This past Monday was Labor Day... we went over to my mom & dad's house to hang out. Here's Mikey & Hannah having fun in the wading pool!
Sunday, September 6, 2009
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!
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!
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Safari's Sanctuary
This month the Joneses have discovered Safari's Wildlife Sanctuary. On the first, Mikey and Michael went with Pack 137 for a service project, cleaning out an old wolf habitat to get it ready for new animals:
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(more pictures right here)
Today Mikey is out of town visiting his cousins, but Cathy and I took Hannah out there to see the animals:
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(more pictures right here)
Both times we had a blast! Safari's is a place where they rescue exotic animals that are in danger of being euthanized, discarded, whatever. As you can see from the pictures, you get to get VERY close to the animals!
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.
Don't miss that other blog post if you're still curious.
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