Kate walks!

Work in progress

We have finally had someone working on the house and to my disbelief, they think they may be finished by the end of the week! The roof is done and the drywall and plaster are up. All that's left is paint and carpet. Yea! I had lost confidence that everything would be complete by Halloween, but that is starting to become a reality. So a month and a half and $9,000 later we are back to normal!
This week it rained so much in one day that the streets in our neighborhood flooded. I watched the water praying it wouldn't reach the house because wouldn't that just be the icing on the cake! Luckily it never got higher than the sidewalk, but you can sort of tell from the picture how high the water got by looking at the tires on the jeep. The crazy thing is that I called Jason to tell him not to bother coming home from work because our Jetta never would have made it and he had no idea how bad it was!

Fun with Kate

We have taken Kate to some fun new places lately. I'm so glad she is finally getting old enough to go places that she can enjoy instead of us just dragging her around with us when we go where we need to. We went to a nearby farm/petting zoo and she had so much fun petting the animals, especially the dwarf goats! They were so cute! Then I took her to the children's museum with some friends from church. The kiddos are a little too young to enjoy the whole museum, but there was a special toddler section that they LOVED. But beware, the cafeteria doesn't have high chairs. Why on earth wouldn't a children's museum have high chairs? Oh well. And this past Saturday we walked in the Race for the Cure. This was Kate's second Race for the Cure, but she was asleep the whole time for the first one. I got pretty emotional near the end because they have a special section for survivors to walk to go across the finish line. I was just thinking how much I wished my mom could walk that section. But it was great to see all the survivors walk it!

8 Years!

8 years of marriage

7 cars (all used)

6 computers

5 years in college (while married)

4 apartments

3 bar exams (Texas, Illinois, Florida)

2 hurricanes

1 everlasting love

Love you babe! Here's to another 8 great years.

On a lighter note...

My baby turned 1! I have always heard people talk about how quickly their kids grow up, but I guess it never really registered with me until now. Jason's family came to Houston for the occasion. I invited a few kids from the neighborhood and ward to a little party and I bought a ball pit and we blew bubbles and had a jar full of puffs that the grownups had to guess the number of. And of course I made Kate her own cake that she could dig into. She was pretty dainty with it at first but really dug into it after awhile. Her are some things about Kate at one year old:

She loves to read books. She also loves to pull all her books off the bookself and hand them to me to read. I read about a page before she pulls another one off to hand to me.

She loves the water. Sometimes if I get really desperate for something to do with her I put her in the tub even if she has already had a bath.

She isn't walking yet but she can stand by herself for several seconds.

She loves to try and get to the dog's water bowl to splash around in it before I figure out what she is doing.

She is a picky eater but she usually likes toast with cheese and peas.

She loves animals. We are pretty sure her first word will be "George" (that's our dog, not the President).

Love you Kate! Happy first birthday!

I hate Ike!

It's been awhile since I posted, thanks to a little hurricane named Ike. I was so unprepared for the wrath of Ike. I think Jason and I have become jaded towards hurricane warnings after hurricane Rita turned out to be not a big deal (for us anyway). So even when it started looking like Ike was headed our way, we still weren't very concerned. I filled up the car with gas and bought some water and canned food. Then all we could do was wait and see what happened. The worst of the storm hit our area around 2am Saturday morning. Sometime around then we lost power and since I couldn't hear Kate on the baby monitor, I moved to a couch outside her room. To be honest, I also felt safer there since I sleep on the side of the bed close to the windows! Jason got up to see what time it was, and we were both glad to see it was around 6am, because we thought the worst had passed and we had avoided any damage. I fell back asleep for a few minutes and was woken up by a huge BANG! I had heard other bangs from tree limbs falling so I wasn't too worried, but when Jason came running into Kate's room, I knew something bad had happened. Sure enough, I went in the bedroom to see a hole in the ceiling and rain pouring in the room. We got buckets to catch the water and moved some stuff out of the room. After that we just kept emptying the buckets. I think we were both in shock and didn't really know what to do. We happened to look out the front window to see someone in the ward driving around to make sure everyone was okay. We ran out and told them what happened. They got a hold of some other ward members and tracked down some chainsaws and tarps. The bishop (!) sawed through the tree and managed to get it off the roof and covered up the hole with a tarp. Other people in the ward helped us get everything out of the room and closet and take out the now ruined carpet. It was an awful day, but it was pretty neat to see so many people rally around us and help us out so much. The insurance adjuster came Saturday and said we would get a check in about 2 weeks. Let's hear it for home owners insurance! Until then, I am getting bids from contractors to do repairs. I have no idea how long it will take to repair or how much it will cost, but I guess once this is all over, I will be schooled in building houses, right? We didn't have power for almost a full week, but it wasn't as hard to deal with that as I would have thought. We have a gas water heater and stove, so we could take hot showers and heat up soup and stuff. Also, the weather really cooled down and the humidity was low so we slept with the windows open and it was quite pleasant. I didn't miss TV as much as I would have thought, but I tell you what, I couldn't stop smiling after the power came back on!

Male mentality

I had to share this with everyone. I opened the fridge the other day to find this. I asked Jason why he had put a fork in the fridge and he said it was because he was using it to eat his potato salad and wanted to save some for later and thought he could just use the same fork. I told him that was not normal and he said "What, am I so fancy I have to use a clean fork every time I eat something?". After he realized how that sounded we laughed pretty hard.