Home, Home on the Range...

Katelyn and I went in September. Our trip was so great! Today is the first day that things have been back to 'normal,' so I'm finally updating!

My friend Elena Baugh and her baby Kara, as well as Katelyn and I, flew to Utah September 21st. That was, to say the least, a joke. I thought I was being so smart...fly out of San Antonio to save a whole bunch of money, fly at night so Katelyn would sleep. Um, yeah...that didn't happen. I've never had a real difficult time flying with Katelyn before, but between the lack of sleep, the drunk guys who had to get escorted off the plane, the late hour, and the cramped space-that is not something I wish to do again anytime soon! Guess it's sorta like childbirth; if we remembered all the pain and stress, we wouldn't ever do it again! :)
We made it however, and everything went up from there. We made Christmas presents, got fun hair-do's, crafted, visited, and had a great 84th birthday party for my Grandpa. It was awesome!

Katelyn loved being outside. She spent as much time there as she could. Actually, we both really enjoyed it! And I've become a wimp--I was so cold most of the time! Guess I'm used to the Texas heat now, eh?! Here's a quick synopsis of our outdoor adventures. We also fed some very aggressive ducks and visited some mean donkeys! It's a miracle we still have our fingers.
Gardening with Grandpa--Mike and I can't wait until our garden is as beautiful as dads!
Bike Riding with Uncle Kyron. I've got to get one of the these things--Katelyn loved it!
Didn't so much like the swing...
At the park with Aunt Brielle and Jillisa
The Zoo!
Thanks Grandma--it was a just a fun day at the Zoo!

Other fun things we did--
A few fun breakfast mornings....Our family and Bradlee and Suzannes family...

And a fun breakfast out with my best friends from the good 'ol days--Stephanie and Deanna. Steph has a baby 2 weeks older then Katelyn. They didn't really get a chance to play together, but us girls sure had a lot of fun. We even hit up a movie!
(Sorry your head is chopped off, Steph!)


The whole purpose for our trip (or maybe, the excuse!) was for my Grandfathers 84th Birthday party. Grandpa has Parkinsons disease and he's very sick--this party was such a neat celebration of his life. I learned so many neat things about him; my mom did such a great job.

Grandma and Grandpa Watson

The Bradlee Watson family. One of the saddest things about living so far away is that I'm not there to hang out with Bradlee and Suzanne. But...they applied for a job in Houston... :)

Grandma and Grandpa and all of the cousins that were able to come...

The family, minus Mike. We missed you babe

It was great to just hang out and be with the family. A special thanks to Kasey and Chels who came over every night to hang out and play games! I'm sure you guys were so tired, but thanks so much for making the effort! It was great! SCUM forever.
I also got to meet Jillisa's man-friend. Good guy, that Chris.
Did I miss anything...mmm? Probably--but since Katelyn is waking up now, it's time to get off the computer.

Next post: A day spent in Pleasant Grove
(no, I didn't forget that! How could I?! Katelyn's only cousins! :)

Lastly--I'll bet grandma is glad to have her clean house back...guess it's not very baby proofed, eh?

We Survived Ike!!

Okay everyone! I don't know if everybody was waiting for my post, but I sure know that I couldn't wait to post it!! Warning--this is going to be a long one! :)
We survived Ike! I never even paid attention to hurricane before we moved here, and now I find myself checking the National Hurricane Center website almost daily, watching for upcoming storms! Who would have thought hurricane could be so exciting.

To begin with, we evacuated to San Antonio and spent the long weekend with Mike's parents. Thank you so much for letting us stay! We left Wednesday night, after Mike got home from work, and we beat the traffic. In fact, when we left the hurricane was not headed directly towards Houston, like it ended up going. We thought that it would miss us completely, or fizzle out and be lame like Edouard. And yet, Mike's work was letting everyone off for Thursday and Friday and so we decided it would be a great vacation!

Good -Bye Beautiful House! Hope you a make it through the Hurricane. Here's our house pre-hurricane!

On the road, we passed tons and tons of these buses--school buses, tour buses, commuter buses. They were all headed into Houston to help people evacuate. It was so neat to see all these people pulling together!


And a great vacation it was...we enjoyed a great lunch at Texas Land and Cattle, we spent Friday afternoon going house hunting with Mom and Dad, and we all watched and cheered the BYU football game! (Did you catch that game! Sweet!!) It was really nice to be able to watch the weather channel and stay up to date with all the Hurricane Ike footage, and it was great to enjoy the air conditioning (which we would soon come to appreciate more!).

Suffering through the Hurricane...

Sonic Stop with Grandma--it's becoming a tradition! Key Lime Slushie...yum!
A GREAT steak restaurant! Come and visit and we'll take you there!

Game day! Go Cougs! And Twinkies..a must have emergency preparedness food!

We headed back to our home Sunday morning, early. We arrived in time for Church on Sunday--and it was one of the neatest Sacrament Meetings I have ever been to. There was no power and so there were no lights and no AC. The meeting was only about 1 hour long; we partook of the sacrament and then had a great talk by one of our Young Men. And then the remainder of the meeting was spent talking about the damages that members experienced and who had what supplies and what expertise. We then all split up and Mike and I went home to see our home for the first time.

Compared to most people, we did awesome! In fact, compared to people that didn't even go through the hurricane, we did awesome. We lost about 20 shingles on the corner of our house, our poor trees looks sad and wilted, and we lost part of our side and back fence. No water damage, no broken windows, no damaged cars. We even were able to save most of our food by bringing back some dry ice from San Antonio.



Our shingle damage. We were so blessed that the damage was so minimal and right on the corner. Other families had roof damage in the middle of their home, and that transferred to wet insulation and Sheetrock and a caved in ceiling.

Fence damage--Katelyn wanted to help! :) And...our poor sunflowers didn't make it...

Our house, post hurricane. Look at our silly, sad trees! And can you see the stop sign, on the right side. It was leaning before, but now it leans a completely different way and way more! :)
After breathing a sigh of relief about our house (Elena and Andrew Baugh, our game buddies who live close to us and stayed home during the hurricane had previously told us that everything was safe and sound--but it was a good relief to see our house with our own eyes!) Mike headed off to help with work crews and Elena and I headed to the Relief Society Presidents house to enjoy for AC and electricity! Thanks Shawna and Barry--your hospitality was amazing!
It was so touching to see how the ward came to together to help each other right after the storm--and even still today! For example, some families in our ward got power back with 24 hours of the hurricane. Those who did housed those of us who didn't so that we could have the AC. Summertime in Texas is not the time to be without air conditioning! :) The Cox family took us in for a few days. It was great! We displaced James and John and added extra mouths to feed...but it was such a blessing! Thanks Cox family!

The Cox kids...Gabbie (in the middle) is one of my great Young Women. It was fun to stay at her house! Thanks for the beds boys!

Monday was spent running around checking on damaged homes and kitty's and people, while some of the men had to go back to work--and others went back to work on the hurricane damage.

Tuesday, a cold front came in and so we moved back home. Katelyn was such a trooper being moved from place to place to place...and she was so glad to be home~! We were glad for the cooler temperatures and it was great to be home. We spent the day fixing the fence and salvaging the rest of our food, and practicing eating food cooked on the barbecue grill. I got to be quite good!

Home at last! Eating our emergency preparedness food! Yum! Pudding!

Just call me the BBQ Babe!

Wednesday Mike had to go back to work, and Katelyn and I spent the day chilling at home--cleaning, sleeping, reading...not too much you can do when you don't have power!

It gets dark early when there's no power! We're just hanging out!

Doing our 'Go Power...We Want Power' dance!

Popcorn Popping on the... Barbecue?

Thursday I went to Elena's to do our laundry and and we had a lovely day doing projects. Elena got power Tuesday evening, and it was nice to be in AC again. We got power about 2:00 on Thursday--yeah! We spent the rest of the afternoon at Elena's finishing laundry and then it was dinner time and I was off to my first ward council. Exciting!

And that brings us up to date. It's great to have power again, and we're even indulging ourselves and have turned down the air a bit more then normal. I'm back to exercising, and now it's time to back for our trip to visit Grandma! More to follow--more pictures and some neat experiences...but gotta go make dinner. Love you all!

Update--

Well--we've had a lovely hurricane. We are planning on heading back to Houston this evening, or early tomorrow morning, but just wanted to let everyone know that things look good. A good friend drove by our house and did an inspection; we lost part of our fence, some shingles, an attic vent pipe, and our trees are leaning in the wind--BUT NO WINDOWS BASHED IN! I was really nervous that we would regret not boarding our windows, so I feel really blessed that everything was okay. Hurricane Ike went straight over our house, but we were very blessed. As far as I can tell, most of our neighbors and ward members fared great as well! We're grateful for the guardian angels that protected our home and neighbors.
More to follow! Count on pictures!

Hurricane Ike

Just a heads up...for those of you who are watching the hurricane (check out our link on the side of the blog), Hurricane Ike is coming to visit. And it's supposed to be a pretty big deal. There was a voluntary evacuation yesterday for our county, and it was upgraded to a mandatory evac this morning. Essentially that means that if you stay, you shouldn't expect to receive a lot of help. You are welcome to stick it out, but it is certainly at your own risk!
Mike and I headed out yesterday after he got home from work. His office is closed today and tomorrow--and maybe longer--so we are taking it as a free vacation. It's a blessing that Mikes parents are in San Antonio...it's not even a question if we have a place to go to. San Antonio might get some rain and wind as well, but we shouldn't lose power or have flooding like is expected in Houston.
So, for those of you who may we wondering how we're doing, we're great! I spent the morning at an Enrichment activity and Mike and his dad are throwing around the idea of golfing. We might even hit Sea World.
We're hoping that all is well at home--we didn't board up our windows, and we don't have flood insurance, so we'll see how we fare! Hopefully all our food isn't spoiled due to the power outages either!

Tagged!

Never been tagged before...this is fun!

Tagged by: Christine

THE FIVE

10 years ago I:
1. Was a Mia-maid
2. Spent Friday and Saturday nights babysitting
3. Read every Jack Weyland book cover to cover
4. Loved to buy new bedspreads
5. Fought like cats and dogs with Kasey

5 things on today's "to do" list:
1. Meet with the old YW President to have a Pow-wow
2. Clean the game room
3. Invite friends over for the BYU game on Saturday
4. Find a new car insurance company
5. Win airplane tickets off of the radio

5 snacks I enjoy:
1. Candy
2. Fresh Fruit
3. Twix bars
4. Mixed nuts
5. Chips and Dip

5 things I would do if I were a millionaire:
1. Fly to Utah on the weekends
2. Decorate my bare home
3. Randomly and anonymously send people checks in the mail
4. Travel
5. Build our deck and extend the kitchen

5 places I have lived:
1. Layton, Utah
2. Provo, Utah
3. Orem, Utah
4. Bryan, Texas
5. Rosharon, Texas

Five jobs I have had:
1. Deseret Book Cashier and Supervisor
2. Head Start Teacher
3. Adult Education Teacher
4. Demo lady at grocery stores
5. Homemaker

I tag...Whoever wants to and
1. Rachel
2. Danielle
3. Steph
4. Chelsi
5. Andrew and Elena

Young Womens...

Okay, so now that this is official, I can finally share. I was sustained as the Silverlake Ward's Young Womens President today. Ah! I've got great counselors and we've got great girls, so it's going to be...great! Anybody have any good ideas or memories of your time in Young Womens that you want to share--life changing activities, lessons, or just simple things that your leaders did to help make a difference! Thanks in advance, and good luck me!