Here I am...Rock me like a hurricane?

Yes! We survived Hurricane Ike, and it was crazy. It's going to take a long time for this area to be back to normal. The winds started in the evening on Friday the 12th, and lasted till the afternoon on Saturday. Ike made landfall in Galveston, about 70-80 miles away from our house at about 2 am on the 13th. The wind and rain was so scary. We had the kids sleep in our room at the side of our bed (on the opposite side of the room from the windows). It was so hard to sleep that night. I kept waking up and watching the news to see what was going on. The power went out at about 4 am (I think). We are some of the "lucky" ones...our power came back on this past Friday morning...so we only had 6 days without power. So many people don't have it yet. We were also lucky that nothing happened to our house...just a few boards loose on the fence. I was really worried about this big tree in the neighbors backyard...but somehow it stayed put. And here's another lucky thing-somehow Houston had an unprecedented cold front come in last week so we didn't all die of heat exhaustion...it was actually quite pleasant outside.

When we first looked out the window it didn't look like things were too bad...we saw a tree down across the road and some damage to our neighbors garage.
Later in the afternoon when the wind and rain had died down some I decided to venture out to my friends house a block down. That's when I started to see how bad Ike actually was. Trees were down all over the place, lots of them on houses...and that's just in our neighborhood, it was so much worse elsewhere. (I had to borrow the tree picts from some friends blogs just so I could show how it looked around here)

I'm just grateful that we don't live on the coast.We lost a lot of food from our fridge and freezer...that was sad. But hey, the first few days were sure did eat well-lots of bbq with friends, family and neighbors! I also learned that you can cook more than just meat on a barbeque...like pizza and nachos. Yum yum. I was also lucky to have a friend with a generator that let me put some of my meat in her freezer so I didn't have to lose it. It was a little bit stressful trying to get ice to keep our other food cold. As you might imagine...it's hard to find when there are no stores open.
The kids dealt with things pretty well...except for the part when Hailey threw up a few times during the hurricane. They got a little scared during the crazy thunder storm the night after Ike hit-the lighting was hitting really close by. They loved playing with the neighbors and really enjoyed having their dad around for a few extra days. (His building at work lost it's roof to the storm). The weather was so comfortable that we were able to go on walks all week long.
I'm getting tired of this post because it is getting so long...so I guess I'll wrap it up. I'm just glad that even with how huge this storm was, so many lives were spared and people are being friendly and working together to get things back together again.

This isn't my house or anything...I just liked seeing the flag up and flying the day after the storm.

I want my mullet back...

Yes, my son was a wanna be Billy Ray Cyrus-but those days are gone now. I gave Hunter his first haircut last week. He looks like such a stud. I had such a hard time letting go of the curls, but after these "before" pictures you will see why I had to do it. The second picture was just after he woke up in the morning, and his hair was so tangled it was just the last straw. (and yes, I could not resist the muscle shirt for his last day with the mullet)
After: (did he just grow up or what?)

We're still here somewhere

Once again I've been waiting till I had pictures to post something. Then I just decided that was too long to wait, I'm going through blogging withdrawals. The kids and I have been in Washington for over a week. We left daddy back at home to earn the big bucks. We've been having a lot of fun visiting grandma and grandpa and our other family that lives in the area. When I get back home I'll have to post some pictures from our visit to my sister's house in Corvallis-we got to go down there for cousin Annika's birthday.
Last weekend was my 10 year high school reunion-go Papermakers (yes, you read that correctly). I was kind of nervous going into it, but we had a lot of fun. Most memorable for me was probably how Heidi, Tara, Mary and I made fools of ourselves dancing up on the stage. Heidi and I were probably up there for 2 hours and sometimes no one else was up there. Good times. I have a few pictures that Heidi sent along, but I'll have to post more when we get home this weekend. I'm not sure why the pictures have funky borders...try and forgive me. The first picture is me (obviously), Melanie, and Heidi.
Here's Hailey and me at the family picnic at the park.

Here's my little Hunter boy. If you can't tell, he made a mess of himself. I tried to keep him clean for a while, but as most of my friends no by now...it is sort of a lost cause. The boy loves puddles, especially muddy ones. He was jumping and rolling around-luckily this time I didn't catch him drinking it. It got to a point where I was introducing my kids as Hailey and "the filthy one over there".

A visit from a friend!

Yay! I finally got a friend to come visit me. We were so glad that Tara and little Luke were able to work out a trip down here this past weekend. Good thing her mom had a convention down here which gave her a great excuse. I've known Tara since the 5th grade...which was a few years ago. We went to bed so late every night cause we did so much reminiscing and catching up. It was a lot of fun. Her son Luke is two months older than Hunter, so the kids had a great time playing together. Luke's favorite thing was to throw everything he could find down our stairs! Good thing he's so cute so we couldn't get mad at him! We took several short trips to Splashtown (thanks Carrie...), played outside, watched movies, and of course ate some good food. I had to take her to my favorite restaurant and obsession, Chuys (this was my third time there in 2 weeks). Below are some picts from the trip. Thanks for coming Tara! We loved having you here even if you did constantly critique my son's mullet! Hunter enjoying his chips dipped in his own bowl of ranch.Here's Hailey with a bottle of what once was a Corona...but now is just salt and pepper, don't worry.I just had to post this picture because this is what Luke does every time you pull out a camera...it takes a good amount of convincing to get his smile out.Here's the three little ones watching Baby Einstein-which is my kids favorite right now.
Here they are after a fun trip to Splashtown...I was so sad that I didn't take the camera inside, there were some great photo ops.
Three cuties in a car.

Down Memory Lane

Okay, I'm going to try this too. I got this from my sister's blog and thought it looked interesting, so all of my faithful blog visitors better be cooperative. Here are the directions:

1. As a comment on my blog, leave one memory that you and I had together. It doesn't matter if you knew me a little or a lot, anything you remember!

2. Next, re-post these instructions on your blog and see how many people leave a memory about you. It's actually pretty funny to see the responses. If you leave a memory about me, I'll assume you're playing the game and I'll come to your blog and leave one about you. If you don't want to play on your blog, or if you don't have a blog, I'll leave my memory of you in my comments.

C'mon now, anything funny, strange, cool, embarrassing, or awful you remember about me?? This could be interesting...

Wait, we need a picture of your gross drink...

So the other day my friend Kate took me to the Asian food market. We've been talking about going since forever. She decided that since it was my birthday she would get a sitter for all of our kids and we would finally just go. It was fun to reminisce about all the stuff I remember from Taiwan, but boy did that store smell bad. It's too bad their fruit wasn't fresher, I would have loved to get some guava or waxed apples-haven't had those in over five years. We got some baozi (steamed bun thingy's) for lunch-this was the first time I've ever had one with meat in it (since I was still a vegetarian on my mission). It was pretty good. Then when we left the store I saw one of the frozen drink places like we always went to in Taiwan, so I just had to go in. I think Kate thought I was nuts cause I got my favorite one that I always used to get. Literally translated it's a green bean frozen drink (though not like American green beans, it's made from mung beans) and I had to get it with jenju-the black tapioca ball things. So then we took a picture in front of the store and Kate was like, oh wait, we need to get another one where you can see your gross drink. So we did.
Thanks for the fun outing Kate! I really enjoyed it!

Fourth of July

Our ward had a nice pancake breakfast at the park to celebrate the holiday-it was pretty cool. I thought it would be nice to get a family picture to show off how patriotic we all looked. Hunter looks very Hawaiian American, right? The second picture down is me with my oldest brother Matt. If you are wondering about all his accessories, he recently had neck surgery...again. He had it done last year and it didn't take, so they did it again (refused some vertebrae). The necklace thing is a bone grower-cool/creepy, huh? Then we've got a picture of Hailey playing and then my handsome little ball player.
We were excited to learn that we could see the big fireworks display that the waterpark puts on from our backyard-no fighting traffic! I would have enjoyed it more if I wasn't dealing with my first migraine that night. It was really not fun, but I am feeling much better now, thank you.