I turned on the television this morning expecting to hear about the usual traffic jams and forecasts of hot temperatures, but was shocked to hear that there had been a massacre in Aurora shortly after midnight. Seventy-one people were shot, twelve are dead already and several are still in critical condition.
This is not an unsafe part of the city. I used to live in Aurora and often shopped at that mall and went to that theater and never worried about any safety issues.
As of late afternoon, the dead had not yet been identified and there are families frantic to hear about their family members who are missing. This reminds me of the Columbine tragedy in 1999, but this is even much worse. It's so hard to understand why a man who by all accounts was from a fine family and was an honors student would set out to murder so many innocent people.
The gunman had also booby-trapped his apartment, and the police still haven't figured out what to do about it. They have evacuated the apartment building and the area several blocks around while they try to come up with a plan to deactivate the bombs.
I took care of my grandchildren today at their house; at one point I didn't see Joey so I went into the front yard to see where he was, and this is where I found him:
One of my hobbies is scrapbooking, and I have been making scrapbooks detailing Joey and Carly's lives. We have so little information about them before they were adopted, so I decided this was a good way to give them a feeling of belonging. Joey loves to look at his scrapbooks, and any time he comes over, the first thing he does is to get out the scrapbooks and sits down and looks at each picture and reads each entry. This was the case last Sunday when he and Grandpa sat on the sofa with the photo albums:
Joey arrived in Denver on Christmas Day of 2008; it just so happened that a reporter from a local TV channel was at the airport hoping to find a story - and he and his photographer made a beautiful story of Joey's arrival and it was on the 10:00 evening news that Christmas Day. We have a DVD of that news story, and Joey loves to watch it too; in fact he watches it over and over with his bright eyes showing his excitement.
Carly enjoys crafts, so she and I sit and the kitchen table and do some painting:
Here is another favorite picture of mine of the two children:
