hurricane ike 9.13.08

the night the hurricane came in we had a gorgeous sunset. you can see the hurricane bands and the clouds coming in.

this is the picture my dad wrote about. grace got up the morning after the hurricane and looked out the window.

thomas brought over the generator he borrowed from work. the rocha's never lost power, so he was kind enough to let us borrow it for the weekend. (they also have some cool pics of the hurricane on their blog. click the link on their name to see 'em) we received so many blessings like this over the last four days.
our power went out around 7 pm on friday night. it was a lot earlier than we had thought/hoped it would. i was cleaning up from dinner and saw the lights flickering. i rushed to run the garbage disposal, and got most of it down when the lights went out.

almost every tree you see these days is leaning... this is the house across the street from us. we have a few leaning trees, too - but we tried to straighten them before i thought to take a picture.

this is another house across from us. the day before the hurricane, they had this huge magnolia tree put in. yeah, that's what we all thought, too! we were all amazed that it was still there when we woke up the next morning. the close-up one above this picture is of all their other plants. they didn't fare as well. kinda funny...

the kids went out at a safe point in the morning. it was still really windy and raining (it really was safe, though!). jayden was hanging on to grace. he was afraid she was going to get knocked down.
we also filled our tub with water, in case the water was out. we explained to jayden that we might need the water to flush toilets with. when he woke up that first morning he went to the restroom and was able to flush the toilet. he came out and said, "mom! we still have toilet electricity!"

our christmas tree made it, too!

these are the signs outside our house. they were hanging on by a thread.

this was the worst of our damage. the 5-foot section of our fence fell down. most of the fences around the complex look like this, or worse, they are all on the ground.

i mentioned before that we have received so many blessings throughout this hurricane. we had a generator and even after we had to give that back, we were able to hang out at papa and kathleen's, then thomas parked his work van here overnight and on it they have an invertor so we plugged in the ol' refrigerator again for a few hours and a lamp. each time we plugged in our cell phones and charged 'em up.
this morning our neighbor called and the kids and i headed over there for the morning. we had lunch and were able to chat. then a knock on the door told us we had power across the street and we were soo happy! jayden has asked me several times this afternoon, 'mom. are you soo happy that we have electricity? i am!' i always answer, 'YES!'
the night the hurricane hit my dad was online through most of our night (i think until 5am-ish houston time). he would send text messages every 30 minutes to an hour, letting me know where the eye of the storm was, or when the hurricane actually hit land. we didn't get much sleep that night, the wind and rain were so loud. so loud! on the news they mentioned the threat of tornados popping up as an after effect of the storm. but they said you would know it was coming because it sounds like a freight train coming straight for you. so the whole night, i'm thinking, if this doesn't sound like a freight train, i'd hate to hear one!
another answer to prayer was that our kids slept through most of it. grace woke up around 4am and climbed into bed with us. (the kids were sleeping on a mattress on the floor in our room.) but she fell back to sleep around 5am. jayden said the next morning that he woke up and heard 'a lot of racket - and i (jayden) was like, dude... did you hear all of that racket, mom and dad?' norah was sound asleep the whole night.
our patience finally ran thin around 4pm yesterday, when we discovered that our power was still out. we even rode the whole way from papa's house to our house with all of our fingers crossed, arms crossed, legs crossed and even our eyeballs at one point! our pastor said at church on sunday that everyone comes to this point of grumpiness when things like this happen. i guess ours came last night. after an hour or so of feeling sorry for myself, thomas showed up with the work van, adam ordered pizza and took the kids to the park, i was able to tidy up the whole house, and we realized how lucky (err BLESSED) we are. we thought about calling our church to see if there were any generators among members, but we decided to leave them to people who may really need it.
I know i am all over the place with this entry, so i hope you bear with me. it's been a long 4 days.
we have many people to thank - my dad first... really, thank you soo much for just helping us through that first night and then your prayers, postings, concerns and listening the last few days. it means so much to me/us.
-and then thomas, who was such a good friend to us. thanks for the generator, the invertor, the meal, the milk, the ice and the kindess.
-our neighbors, the escueda's, who weren't here through the hurricane, but when they found out we didn't have electricity today, invited me and the kids over. thank you for your friendship and lunch today!
-and papa and kathleen. thanks for football (it meant a lot to adam), for food and for drinks!
-and the rest of our families (mom, suzanne and john, elisabeth, april and jo) for praying with us, for us... asking others to pray (even car customers with less than perfect credit)... we feel loved.
-and all of you, who are reading and have commented with your prayers and sighs of relief for us! thank you...