Nearly Normal

We made it back home today. The house has power, gas, water, all the amenities. Matt even found things like milk and cheese at our local grocery store. Apparently not very many stores in the area have perishable items like that. We're really living it up, I guess. (Oh, and we have Internet; did you figure that out?) From here we should get back to normal slowly but surely. Matt will be back at work tomorrow, and the day should feel pretty normal. Too bad Patrick can't go back to school on Thursday, though. I'm looking forward to that one thing going back to normal.

And now that I have a few seconds, here are a few pictures I've been saving up. I took these one afternoon when Patrick was at school and the day was beautiful outside. Nathan and I couldn't resist enjoying the pretty day.

Ike Update...The Last...I Hope

I apologize for the silence for the last few days, but as expected, the power went out. It happened sometime during the night Friday night, when Ike was blowing his hardest. The wind was quite scary. I spent a fairly sleepless night listening for noises out of the ordinary that could signal problems. Then I was awake because of the heat in the house after power went out.

On the bright side, we woke up to much calmer weather Saturday morning. The worst had passed, and by late morning the rain was a mere drizzle and we were able to assess the damage. It was minimal, thank goodness. Our area and neighborhood fared quite well, much better than the scenes you have been seeing on the news.

Personally, we have some roof damage from the winds, but nothing that will leak during rains (this morning's thunderstorm tested that already). I am sure that our roof issues are very low on the priority list for repairs. We also had one small section of fence blow over and some minor damage to our air conditioner. Considering how bad things seem to have gone all over the area, we were very lucky. Even one of our neighbors had a huge section of their roof down to just plywood and already have six different leaks in the roof as a result. Another house in our neighborhood in the progress of being built, just a frame and plumbing, blew over entirely onto the (uninhabited) house next door.

This morning our power attempted to come back on. When Matt went outside to inform our neighbors who were enjoying a breakfast in the relative cool of their porch, he watched as a nearby transformer blew up, shooting sparks and bursting into flames. Coincidentally--or not--our power immediately went down again. That's when we made the decision to try a post-hurricane evacuation. We were tired of living like refugees on peanut butter and jelly and bottled water, unable to even shower and wilting in the heat.

We are now with my parents in Dallas, among many other refugees who got out before the hurricane. We have air conditioning here, as well as cold food and ways to heat food again. It's amazing how much you appreciate such simple comforts after living without them for a few days. Naturally we found out when we were nearly here that power had returned to our neighborhood sometime this afternoon, but we decided we would be better off staying put here until things had returned to a semblance of normal down there, when we could get things like milk at the grocery store again.

The boys are doing about as well as could be expected after the uncertainty of the past few days. They both slept like...well, babies through the hurricane but have had troubles napping every since because of the heat. Any little change from his normal routine, like not turning on his fan at naptime, has thrown Patrick into hysterics. The last hour of the drive today had both boys reaching their melting point, and all Matt and I could do was laugh at the simultaneous tantrums thrown by inconsolable boys in our backseat. What else was there to do?

And now we are just planning to sit tight for a few days. You can be sure we'll be watching the news carefully and talking to people from back home to find out when things in our area are back to normal. It will probably only be a few days for us, not the weeks or months like people who live farther south. I'm sure you will find out shortly after we get home and what we see when we get back there. Hopefully things will seem a little more normal then than they did when we left.

Ike Update 4

We're still not getting rain yet, but the wind seems to be picking up some. Matt and I will probably head to bed soon, and we're praying the weather lets us sleep. The worst will probably hit here in the few hours before dawn. As it is, nothing is too bad here yet. The worst so far are the noisy neighbors who are taking the opportunity to have a hurricane party, complete with copious amounts of alcohol. I'm more worried about them waking up the boys than the weather.

This will probably be the last update tonight. If we have Internet tomorrow, I will update. Most likely we will not, though, so I'll get word to the parents as soon as we have cell service (if it even goes down).

Ike Update 3

There's still nothing exciting to report, but I figured that was a report in itself. It's finally getting pretty cloudy, but it doesn't look like rain yet. The only indications that anything is happening are the constant hurricane updates on the news, the abandoned air of the neighborhood (since everyone is already taking shelter in their houses), and the gusty wind. According to the news, it's about to start raining pretty far south, and the storm surge is already flooding many areas to the south. Fortunately we are out of the storm surge area by a long shot, so any flooding will have to come from rain, which is apparently still several hours out. There's a good chance the worst weather will happen overnight for us. We're in play-it-by-ear mode, so we'll see what ends up happening this evening and tonight. I hope I'll get to update again soon.

Ike Update 2

As of almost 1:00 here, there is still little action. It's getting a little breezy outside, but nothing more than a typical west Texas day. This morning Matt and I made our final preparations for Ike, pulling in everything from our yard. We even had time to take the boys down to the playground for a few minutes to let them run out some energy before being cooped up for the next few days. On our way down there, we saw several of our neighbors also preparing for the storm. It looks like most of our neighborhood has chosen to stick around as well.

We've done just about everything we can to prepare, so all that's left is to wait and pray. I'm still not terribly worried. I'll try to update again in a few hours after it's started raining as long as we still have power and wireless. I fully expect to lose both sometime this evening, and we will probably also lose cell service. Please don't worry if you try to call and can't get through. As soon as we can get on our phones again after an outage, we will call both sets of parents. Depending on how difficult it is to get through, we may task them with passing on the word of how things have gone (I hope you guys are okay with that!).

And now the excitement starts--at least in the next few hours.

Hurricane Update

Okay, so I'm assuming that most of you have heard about Hurricane Ike. Yes, he looks to be headed straight towards Houston. No, we are not running.

As long as we have power and wireless Internet, I plan to update as often as possible to let you know what is going on here. Right now, it's beautiful, sunny, and hot. There is also an aura of busyness in the area. Everyone is stocking up on water and food, filling up their cars with gas, and beating a path out of town for many. Pretty much everyone on the south and southeast sections of town are taking refuge wherever they can. I've heard from several of my friends over there, and they have found places to stay already.

We are on the far west/northwest side of town, so we are not even in a voluntary evacuation area. It appears that most people around here are staying put and are planning to just weather the storm. Because of the increased traffic from all the evacuees that NEED to get out of here, the roads are pretty much packed already. That's one of the main reasons that Matt and I decided to try our luck here instead of picking our way across Texas to somewhere safer.

We've taken most of the preparations we're going to. Around lunchtime tomorrow we should see the beginnings of the storm, and at that point we'll see just how well we prepared. We're expecting lots of rain and some fairly high winds (although I doubt they're that bad, considering both of our experiences in west Texas). Power will probably go out at least for a little while and possibly for a long while.

At least we know what we're getting into. And it's sad, but part of me is actually excited to go through my first hurricane. I wouldn't feel that way if we were closer to the coast, but this far inland, it may actually be a fun adventure.

And of course, if anything changes and it looks like things will end up worse here, we are ready to leave at a moment's notice, traffic and all. But then, just like Rita three years ago, the hurricane could just be psyching us out and hit somewhere else altogether after all.

Either way, we'd appreciate some prayers sent down this way, for us and for everyone else who is about to be affected by Ike.

More Tidbits

In no particular order...

--Nathan has another tooth. It's another bottom one to complete the set of four on the bottom. This brings the total to eight. He's also working on those molars--still--and is teething badly enough some days to keep him awake at night and cause a small fever (at least that's what I hope has caused the fever in the last week). I think we'll all celebrate when those finally cut. Here's a picture of the next-to-the-last tooth to cut:
--He's also still not quite crawling yet and doesn't seem the least bit motivated to learn the proper way to do it. He gets everywhere he wants to go with the bear crawl/scoot, so why bother learning the real way? I finally got some pictures of this scoot move.

You can see he's trying to stand up and will push that cute booty way in the air sometimes. He doesn't have the balance in his hips and torso yet, though, so he can't stand all the way up. Instead he'll just fall back down on the bottom and scoot a little farther.

He obviously loves being mobile either way. Don't you love the new way he's smiling too? It looks like a cross between a smile and a grimace because of how he scrunches up his nose. I love it!

--Patrick has named his dinosaur with a real name at last: Joshua. My theory behind the name is that he's finally figured out who else we're talking to when we scold him with his full name, Patrick Joshua. He's Patrick, so whoever else is with him when he gets in trouble must be Joshua. Well, the dinosaur is always with him, so therefore he must be Joshua. Matt's theory is funnier, though. He thinks Patrick named the dinosaur Joshua so that when we scold him with both names he can blame the dinosaur instead. "It wasn't Patrick this time, it was Joshua!"

--Nathan has started pulling up entirely on his own. Before he loved to pull up on our fingers, but I know I was giving him some support and helping him balance. Now he can do it on his own given the right environment. I suspected the enclosed play area might just provide that for him.

This was the very first time it happened. We had just dropped Patrick off at school for his first day and I set Nathan in his pen to play for a few minutes. I looked away for a minute, and this is what I saw when I looked back. The way he's kind of clinging to the side makes me think of the Spiderman song for some reason. You can tell he's pleased with himself. He does this regularly now. The funniest was this morning when Patrick was in "real time-out" (versus "play time-out," what Patrick calls the play area) right next to Nathan in the play area, and Nathan pulled up right next to where Patrick was standing. They were just inches apart with only the gate thing in between them, both of them hanging onto it.

--Patrick is learning so much at school. He's been trying to tell me some about it, but his limited vocabulary leaves me confused most of the time. So far I have figured out that they color at least some days, he "sleeps tight" during the day, and he likes his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich at lunch. He always makes sure to tell me all about what he ate for lunch, as though I hadn't packed it for him myself.

In the meantime, Nathan and I have been having fun on our own during school days. Yesterday we headed to Target to pick up a few birthday presents to hide away until the boys' birthdays in a few weeks. That is an outing I wouldn't dare try to do alone with both boys, so it is fun to get to do things like that when only Nathan is around. It will be interesting to see what we can find to do with ourselves tomorrow when Patrick is back at school.