Disneyland!

Our first ride of the day was the Matterhorn -













At the end of a long, fantastic day, it was finally time to go home. We were in the park from 8:30am until 11:30pm (which was 1:30am Houston time). The kids were exhausted, but very happy, even though it doesn't show in Rachel's face.












We flew to California for the week of Thanksgiving and while we were there went to Disneyland!!! We went with Ryan's brother Scott and his family, and through peer pressure from her cousins we got Ellie to ride on Space Mountain! She was pretty scared the whole time and wanted me to cover her eyes. She said she had fun, but definitely didn't want to do it again!


Andrew, Karson, Kelli, Kylie, Ellie, Rachel, and KC (all the K names are cousins - Scott and Wendy Brady's kids!)

Halloween

Sean and his friend, Holden, are very into the Lord of the Rings books this year, so Sean decided to dress up as a ringwraith and Holden is Legolas. They had a good time acting out their parts and battling each other.

















This fairy costume Rachel is wearing represents hours of blood, sweat, and tears on my (Wendi's) part. OK, so it wasn't that bad, but somehow I got the crazy idea that it would be cheaper and better to make a fairy costume instead of buying one. If you don't already know, I break sewing machines just by looking at them, so this really was a crazy thought for me. But it turned out just fine, and the most important thing is that Rachel was happy with it! Here she is with her best friend, Phoebe, who is also a fairy. :-)










Our good friend from Green Bay, Anne Dangerfield, came to trick or treat with us, so we dressed her up as an African princess. :-) Ellie and her friend Isabel attached themselves to her (which on a dark night with lots of people around we were so grateful for) and off we went to get candy.














Andrew, by far, got the most comments about his cute little costume. The best part was when he would say, "Arrrgh" in his best piratey voice. Such a cutie! This was his first year to really get excited about trick or treating. He still (2 weeks later) asks people, "What are you going as?" and the he tells them all about what each of us dressed up as.

After Ike

We made it through Hurricane Ike with very little damage, and even though we were without power for 3 days, we feel so blessed in so many ways. This picture is our home, and other than lots of leaves in our pool, the only other "repairs" we needed to do was to tip back up the two tall spruce trees that you can see tipped over. (The tree on the left side of the picture actually looks like shrubs because it is completely flat on the ground.)




We can see this tree laying on a power line from our backyard. Compared to other places in the Houston/Galveston areas, this is nothing, but it still is unsettling to see what power was in the storm.









It was scary during the night to look outside and see the silhouettes of these tall pine trees bending and swaying in the wind. This tree is not an optical illusion - it really looks like the tree is just about to fall on the house, but so far it has held it's ground. It is just around the corner from us and the owners of the tree evacuated, and the owners of the home are hoping they return quickly and can have it cut safely down.







This home was not in our neighborhood, but just a few miles away. I hope the residents had evacuated. I spent the entire night of the hurricane listening to the wind howl and hearing popping and strange noises all around our house just waiting for the loud crash of something falling or flying into our house. We had all the kids sleep in our master bedroom closet, and I felt like they were safe, but I just feel so grateful that we didn't have to deal with anything like this during the night.

Hurricane Ike

Since I haven't kept up with this blog and since I'm generally not very good at keeping in touch, you may not even know that we are living in Houston, TX. (We are actually in Cypress which is a far north west suburb of Houston).
(Friday, September 12) The kids had the day off of school today and most of the area businesses are closed (including HP where Ryan works) so that we could have the day to prepare for Hurricane Ike.
You can see we took down the net on our trampoline and flipped it over to try to keep it from being carried by the strong winds we are predicted to get during the night tonight.
These pictures were taken at about 7:30pm and while the wind is strong it doesn't feel scary or stronger than other storms we've had here... yet!
Since we are not in an evacuation area, and are far enough away from the coast we have been advised to stay in our home and ride out the storm here. We are hoping there won't be much or any damage to our neighborhood. More than likely we will lose power for a while, but for now we are just waiting to see what happens. I can't tell you how good it feels to know we have 72-hour kits, a full pantry, and cans of wheat, dry milk, sugar, etc, under our beds! And - after 4 years of owning empty water drums, we finally filled them yesterday!

We're back... two years later!

So when Ryan set up this blog for us two years ago I really didn't get it (and Andrew had just been born...) so now I'm catching up with the times, and I'm going to try to keep up to date pictures here!

This picture was taken by Sean at Andrew's 2nd birthday party, and since we have tons of pictures since my last blog I'm going to just put in a few of the highlights over the last 2 years.