Surviving Ike

The night Ike came to Houston Bobby & I were all prepared. Zach was in the pack n play in our closet and Madison was on the floor on my side of the bed. We had pillows, blankets, flashlights & a cell phone in the closet in case we needed to head in there quickly. We watched the news and once the outer bands started hitting our area we headed to bed to get a couple of hours of sleep-except I couldn't go to sleep. In our bedroom we have a wall of windows with small rectangular shaped windows on top of them. The larger windows have wood blinds on them, but the smaller windows gave me a perfect view of the large trees in our backyard and in the forest behind our house. I layed in bed as Bobby slept soundly until I would elbow him saying we needed to head to the closet. He kept saying we were fine and would fall back to sleep all the while I was watching those trees swaying in and out of sight-praying that they wouldn't fall and land on our house. Finally about 4:30 our power went out and I fell asleep-only to wake up around 6:30 with Zach (he actually woke up around midnight and I put him in bed with us). I quickly checked outside to see if we had any down trees. We were very fortunate-we had 3 trees down. One was a tall oak tree-it sat in the middle of our yard and fell in such an angle that it barely scraped our house. I think we have one shingle damaged from that tree. The other tree was our neighbors-it fell over the fence. Bobby and our neighbor Matt got it cut down with minimal damaged to our fence (I think they need to replace on board). The last tree was the small trees that the builder planted in our front yard. One of them was leaning and Bobby just re-staked it. We did have a lot of limbs and debree that was in our yard-I think the last count was 8 42-gallon trash bags FULL to the brim-this isn't including the tree or the several branches that somehow found themselves on the other side of the fence. :-) We are still without power however; we are doing great! God brought us a WONDERFUL cold front that is helping keep things manageable. We aren't expected to get Power back until September 29th. Madison is out of school all week and they haven't updated the schedule for next week. We have tons of things to be grateful for-we are all alive and unharmed (except for the splinter I got from a pine tree while picking up debree yesterday), we have water-including hot water, we have a gas stove that I can cook on, and we found a generator fairly quickly on Sunday, and most of all-I didn't have to handle the storm alone. Bobby left for work last Tuesday and Shell allowed him to come home to help get things situated before the storm. His boss told him to not make a return flight until after the storm passed. Bobby didn't have to fly back until last night-so he was here to help me get the tree cut up, clean up outside, get the generator and set everything up. THANK YOU SHELL!! I'm not sure I could have taken care of everything by myself with Madison & Zach. For now we are doing great. I'm actually writing this from Tara's house-she only lost power for about 12 hours (about the same amount of time our old house did) so I'm here doing laundry. For those of you who have tried calling you have to leave a message-I'll eventually get the message-It might take a couple of hours for it to notify me, But I will try and call back.

**please pray for all of those who had damage from Ike. We have 3 neighbors who have HUGE trees laying on top of their houses. I will say this-I have been very impressed with our new neighborhood. Everyone was out the day after the storm checking on each other. Everyone has offered to help each other out. Like I said before God's timing is perfect. Even though I would have had power in our old house-I feel so much safer and taken care of in our new house.

Sorry I don't have any pictures--I'll try and go online tonight when I hook up the generator and post some pictures. I have some from our house and LOTS from driving around.