How A Heavenly Ummamum came to be
Um… um… um…
What shall we put on this website?
That’s how Ummamum got its name—I didn’t know what to use for a screen name in March of 2000, and nobody else had this one.
Today our main website is called The Oo Kingdom, and it resides at www.ookingdom.com. The Ummamum still occupies a corner of it. That corner is called Ummamum’s World, and it contains a lot of funny stuff.
The central figure is the Ummamum Guy, a strange-looking character with a green face. His upper teeth are always shown sticking out over his lower lip. Try saying Ummamum (“UM-um-um”) with your front teeth sticking out, in front of a mirror. You’ll see for yourself how funny it looks!
But lately the Ummamum (at least for our family) has become a sort of ambassador of good will. Whenever one of us is feeling down, someone can do the Ummamum and cheer that person up. Seeing something funny like that, in the midst of a tough time, can help put things in perspective by shifting the focus away from the pain or whatever. I might add that it doesn’t always work—but often it helps.
Just after midnight on October 26, 2002, Wendi Petitt suggested that I create an Ummamum angel, complete with wings and a halo. At about the same time, I remembered that our free Web space on Charter.net wasn’t being used for anything, and I had a stash of nice inspirational stories with nowhere to put them—there was no proper category for such material on The Oo Kingdom (they don’t all fit well into Our Faith). Rather than add still another category to an already widely diverse website, I decided to develop a new site instead. The idea for A Heavenly Ummamum was born.
Having a second site sounded like a good idea, but we didn’t like it. Two months after opening the site, we moved it to its present location in The Oo Kingdom.