Hurricane Ike and our world

I figured I needed to do an update for everybody who I haven't spoken to about these last two weeks.

Hurricane Ike came ashore on Friday, September 12th. Chris and I decided last minute to go ahead and ride out the storm, but to do it at my parent's house since they live in a newer neighborhood with not quite as many trees as our neighborhood. There were several other factors, but that happened to be the main one. I knew we were up for a rough night and several days afterwards, but figured we would be fine. I honestly was not too worried about our safety as our area was told to just "hunker down", which means to stock up, prepare and stay put. So we did just that.

That afternoon we went for a walk around the mini-lake behind my parent's house. Aidan just loves feeding the ducks and we thought we would take advantage of it being so pretty before the storm wrecked everything. :-)





Here is Aidan hamming it up for the camera.



That evening I ended up taking some amazing photos of the clouds in the sky - before the storm came. Excuse the heads! :-)




Aidan and my mom were doing this silly surfer move together. It was too cute - he wouldn't stop. Of course I took a picture of it. My mistake was not also catching my mother in action. :-)



We actually ended up being able to fall asleep that night, with Aidan in probably the safest bedroom of the house. At around 1-ish I woke up hearing wind, but more to have to go to the bathroom (you know, typical pregnancy stuff). I heard my parents in the living room with the TV on and knew I was up because I wanted to see what was going on. My parents didn't end up losing power until around 5 in the morning, so we were able to watch exactly what it was doing, where it was heading, everything. This made me feel much safer about where we were, but made me nervous about my house and family and friends that were more east of my parent's house, since that looked like where it was going. Aidan did wake up around 4-ish. He climbed on my lap while we were watching the coverage and very quickly fell asleep again. When the electricity went off, we all got up and decided to head to bed to get a few more hours of sleep.

Later that day, my sister and her daughter joined us since no one had electricity and we figured we could at least play games. We did make a drive to our house to make sure there was no severe damage. Thankfully, it survived. Our yard did not so much. :-) It could have been so much worse though! Here are a few pics of our front yard.




We all ended up staying at my parent's house, sweating in the heat, until Sunday afternoon when Chris called home. Low and behold our answering machine came on! We had electricity! So, we all packed up and headed to our house. We got to clean up the yard and spend some more quality family time in the AC. We were very lucky as most of everyone we know did not have power yet. My parents ended up going back to their house on Tuesday, but on Wednesday we had additional visitors. My sister's neighbor, Ginger, and her son were getting miserable and had no place to go so I offered out house. They ended up staying through Friday.

Even though we were lucky that we got power, life around here was still a little tricky. Lines at the gas stations were HOURS long. I literally saw people in every line I drove by pushing their cars that ran out of gas. Grocery stores had no power, so any cold stuff was not an option for many days. They were only letting in a certain amount of people in the stores at a time. My mom and I bypassed the crazy stores here in Atascocita and headed to Kingwood where we were only 10th in line outside. Not bad. Luckily we rationed our last gallon of milk and barely had enough for Aidan before we were able to get more. There were also curfews set which began around 8-9 depending on the area you were in. We also had to boil our water to drink and quickly started making ice cubes with it in some trays I picked up at the store. I am so thankful we had power!!

Friday afternoon we headed up to Austin to celebrate my brother's birthday (which was the 10th) and attend my niece's 2nd birthday party. We had a great time over there. I do not get to see them enough!! Kaetlyn is so adorable. She has these cute little curls in her hair - what a little girl! Kaetlyn and Aidan got to take a bath together. I completely forgot to take my camera, so hopefully I will get sent some copies (hint, hint). Kati took some cute pictures of them all cute and smiley. Then there was an issue with the toys and they both freaked out and started screaming. Is it bad that we decided to capture that moment on film as well? We couldn't resist. It wasn't as if they were being aggressive with each other, they were just all red faced and crying.

Unfortunately, Aidan started to not feel well during/after the party and the ride home Saturday night was miserable for everyone. Turns out that Aidan has a BAD virus and a sore throat. His throat is so bad that there are little pockets of pus back there. I took him to the doctor on Monday morning and he had a fever there of 103.9! They tested Aidan for strep throat and for the flu (evidently they have already diagnosed a few kids this week with the flu - watch out!!). Both tests came back negative, which means that it just has to run it's course. I had to make the fun phone call to my brother and the rest of my family to warn them about exposure to this fun virus. Yuck! Today his fever still peaked at 103.3, but I think he is starting to turn a corner. THANK GOODNESS!

Please pray that Chris and I stay healthy and do not get this. It is a long, tough one!