IS SHE CRYING, AND PLAYING?

For some reason when she gets real tired or sick of playing in her jumper, she continues to jump her little heart out as she is crying. I don't understand. But it is kinda funny.

DINNER BY CANDLELIGHT

After the storm, we were without power for 6 days. It was a very long long time to be without power, we are very blessed that it finally came back on last Thursday because most people in our ward are still without power. It's really sad. Things seem to be getting back to normal somewhat around here, the grocery stores finally have food, and you don't have to wait 2 hours to get gas anymore. Our good friends Mike and Andrea have been staying with us this week because they are Hurricane Ike evacuees. Mike is going to Med school in Galveston, and they left a week before the storm hit with about 3 days worth of clothes not knowing the storm would hit Galveston and not knowing how bad it would be. They were finally able to get to Galveston yesterday to go through their muddy smelly apartment to salvage what they could. We have enjoyed having them here. They are going to Utah in a couple of days till further notice.
Anyways, things here are ok now. We luckily had a gas stove so we could still cook, and a generator to run our fridge to keep our food cool. We are so much luckier than most people around here. What would we have done without that generator? Here is how we spent our evenings. Dinner by candlelight.

LAZY DAY

After we got our power back on we had people over at our place day and night. Our neighbors slept over one night and we had the bean bag downstairs. In the morning, I put on Brystal's favorite movie, Baby Einstein and plopped her in the bean bag and she was in heaven. She doesn't even realize I'm taking her picture she is so comfortable.

TAKE A HIKE IKE

Our first hurricane in Houston, it was a doozy too. Here is the waves crashing againsted the sea wall at Galveston. This was 7 or 8 hours before the storm even hit. Amazing. Here is our hurricane adventure.

WAITING FOR THE STORM

Brystal looks adorable as usual decked out in her Utah State attire including bows.

Sitting on the grass waiting for the storm to hit. It was a very eerie evening with everyone home waiting for this storm.

The calm before the storm.

Here comes the storm

FINALLY THERE IS LIGHT

Unfortunately the worst of the storm hit us in the middle of the night and it was hard to see what was happening out there. The sounds were terrifying, and occasionally I would see the sky light up with bright green and blue, and then I'd hear the sound of electricity buzzing in the sky as the power would go out. We lost power at abou 2:30 and will probably most likely be out of power for the next few days. Luckily we have my in laws generator to help us keep our refrigerator going. Here is a clip of the storm when we got up around 7. The storm was starting to settle down but as you can see it was still very strong. It was probably twice this bad during the night but this is what I got from our backyard.

THE DAMAGE IS DONE

Our house and neighborhood managed to get away with little or no damage. After driving around the neighborhoods in our area, I realized how blessed and lucky we were. Here are just a few of the pictures of the wreckage.

This is the creek, it is way over flooded, usually there is a gully under this bridge, now it looks like a lake.

The streets are flooded in some areas, you can't even get by.


This is a typical picture of what almost every other house looked like. HUGE trees just uprooted. The lucky ones fell into the street of yard.

The unlucky ones had trees in their house. This is a hard picture to see, but the tree actually fell right through their house and crunched even the bricks.

We are so lucky that we were untouched by anything like this

GALVESTON ISLAND

For the labor day weekend, we headed down to Galveston on Friday and Saturday despite rumors of hurricane Gustav heading our way. It was perfect weather and we really had a good time. we met up with our friends Chris and Sarah Zarsky on Saturday with their kids and played all day at the beach.

SOPHIE LOVES THE BEACH

We did bring Sophie with us. Sometimes it's fun, but most of the time, it is a hassle to bring her along places, but she seemed to have the time of her life at the beach as usual. So I guess it was fun to have her along.

BEACH WAVES

Brystal had fun splashing and crawling around in the water. Everything was fine and dandy on Friday, and then on Saturday she freaked out when we put her in the waves. I don't know what her problem was but it might have something to do with this.....






Don't worry, she's ok, this picture was taken just seconds after the incident so she seems fine. She just sneezed a hundred times and was back to normal.

RINSING OFF

After we spent the day at the beach our friends had an aunt that has a beach house here, so we borrowed their outdoor shower to rinse off before heading home. Brystal loved going under the shower, and was giggling and kicking with excitement. We had a great weekend at the beach and no we did not get hit by the hurricane that was heading our way.