5/1/11

It was just another Sunday night. We were watching "America's Funniest Videos" and the kids had just had ice cream when the program was interrupted by a "BREAKING NEWS" banner and music. My first thought was, "Oh no, who died?" and my mind started rattling off a list of U.S. politicians.

Imagine my surprise when the reporter said they were awaiting President Obama's statement from the White House, and that terrorist Osama bin Laden was dead - killed during a daring military operation.

Naturally, the kids were wondering why their show was cut off and what this hubbub was all about. At that, Christian and I knew we had to give them a crash course in 9/11. We told them about the terrorists and the four planes. I found a video on YouTube to Alan Jackson's "Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning" that had footage from the day of the terrorist attack. It was devastating, and the kids were both sobbing and darn near inconsolable by its midpoint. :(

But we continued talking and re-focused the conversation on the news of the day, talking about how successful the troops had been in their mission and how the bad guy wasn't going to hurt any more people. This morning we watched a BrainPOP video about 9/11. I was impressed that they'd already updated it to reflect bin Laden's death.

The kids had a few more questions today, and CJ talked about how different things would be if he had a time machine. (He'd go back and stop the hijackers and force them to tell him where bin Laden was hiding.) I told him I liked the way he thinks. ;)

SUNNY SUNDAY: We actually had darn near two full days of sunshine this weekend. Sunday morning we took advantage of the weather and went to Discovery Park. We kinda sorta played tennis for about a half hour and then the kids hit the playground.
On the floor of this heavily forested park, we noticed that most all the sword ferns had fiddleheads sprouting.
It was really cool looking, and we took the time to examine them up close.

SPECIAL DELIVERY: This weekend CJ took receipt of a package he's been eagerly awaiting. It was a game he ordered from Japan via eBay.
He asked that I record a video of him opening it. :)

He was super excited to play the game, of course, and plugged it into his Super Famicom converter and plugged that into his Super NES. And ... it didn't work. :/

The game looks to be in pristine condition, and we know the converter and Super NES work, so we did a little research. We're pretty certain now that the problem is the converter simply won't work for that game - that it can only be played on a Super Famicom system made in/from Japan. So, you know what this means. Now we have to track down a Super Famicom system. The saga continues.

IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY: We FINALLY made it to the Star Wars Exhibit at the Pacific Science Center today. Good thing - it closes at the end of the week.

To get ready, we twisted Bee's ponytails into some Princess Leia buns.

Before the exhibit we checked out the "Millenium Falcon Experience." To be honest, I didn't find the "experience" all that enthralling. The Falcon mock up was cool, but you didn't really get to check it out because they shuttle you into it and out of it so fast, and the whole time you're in there, it's damn near pitch black.

I tried to post more photos here, but Blogger keeps crashing my Internet Explorer.

I uploaded a couple dozen photos from the exhibit to Facebook. If you have a Facebook account, you should be able to see them here.