hurricane ike

Pine tree that fell right by our bedroom window, just missing
our house.

Our neighbors shed that the wind lifted over our fence and
landed right by our sliding glass door.

A week after we had to evacuate for Hurricane Gustave, our area was hit by Hurricane Ike, which makes 3 hurricanes in three years, (Rita, Humberto, and Ike). This time we decided not to evacuate. The night the hurricane hit we spent the night at Brian's parents house, because our house is surrounded by very large pine trees and during hurricane Rita one crashed right onto our house. During the night the winds started picking up and around 1 am we lost power. The wind was very loud and scary. Amazingly Brian and the kids slept right through it all. We are still in our town even though the power is still out and probably will be out for at least another week or more. We were blessed to get a generator from Brian's Dad and our home is undamaged, so life is good under the circumstances! Going through a Hurricane really makes you appreciate things that normally might be taken for granted, electricity, air conditioning, running water, food, shelter.

frog

Aiden caught this huge frog while he was outside playing. He knocked on the door to show me the frog, I was totally not expecting to see a huge frog being held up to my face and it made me jump! After Aiden was done playing with the frog, he threw it in a bucket filled with water and placed a lid over the bucket, so the frog wouldn't escape. Poor frog, Brian will have to go free it in a little while so it doesn't die.

mandatory evaucation

Last week, our area was under mandatory evacuation because of Hurricane Gustave. We decided to go to my parents house and leave on Saturday night, instead of when the mandatory evacuation officially started on Sunday morning. Thankfully, the traffic wasn't near as bad as when we had to evacuate for hurricane Rita. This time it took us about 3 hours to drive what is normally about a 2 hour trip, as compared to hurricane Rita where it took us 13 hours to drive what is normally a 3 hour trip. That weekend was labor day weekend and we had lots of fun spending it with my family. We sort of figured our area wouldn't be hit that hard, but didn't want to risk it with 3 small children and me being 7 months pregnant. It turns out our area barely got any rain, but we did get a fun weekend out of it and Dario got several days off of school, which he was happy about. Hopefully that is all of the evacuating we have to do this hurricane season!