Surprise!!!

Well, this last month has been eventful.....Our Vietnam adoption officially came to an end, we researched about 20 more programs, and we were on our way to signing up for a new program, when we found out, drumroll please, that I. am. pregnant.

Yes, as Chris said, "I could have woken up this morning with my face sewn to the carpet, and I wouldn't be more surprised than I am right now." We were all speechless, well, except for my Dad, who had, by far the best response of anyone, and really summed up what we all were feeling, but again, being a family blog, you will have to ask him to repeat what he said. Let's just say, I always love my Dad's uninhibited enthusiasm.

I won't go into all the details about why this was really something that was impossible, but let's just say, the likelihood of being in this situation was slim to none. You might remember my post a while back asking to pray that God would do the impossible in our Vietnam adoption. I really believed that the impossible would be that we would get a referral and complete our adoption, but God had a different plan for our family. I wonder if he was up there laughing at us all this time, knowing what was coming as we worked so hard to try and figure our our next step. Trust me, there were many tears shed over this process. But, His idea of impossible was allowing me to be pregnant again. Now that we have all had a chance to regain our composure about the whole thing, we are very excited. I went to the doctor this morning, and there is definitely a little bean in there with a little heart beating away, and in case anyone is wondering, it is too early to tell if it is a girl or not.

My sweet friend Alicia gave me a card after I told her the news that I think sums this whole situation up in the best way I have heard.

Sometimes we laugh at God's sense of humor.
Sometimes we shake our fists at the sky.
Sometimes we just have to let the joy of it all overtake us.

OK, now we have power

I jumped the gun a little on the previous post, we HAD power, but then it got turned off after about 10 hours. The funny thing was that most of our neighborhood had power, but about 20 houses didn't, and we were one of them. We had an extension cord running across our yard to our neighbors garage so that we could have a light on at night and turn the tv on. The boys did very well for 3 days without power, but we were all exhausted and ready for it to be back on. And guess what, yesterday, it came back on, and has stayed on. Ryan was running around the house saying "it's a miracle." He is so cute. Anyway, we feel very blessed, even without power, the house stayed cool thanks to the strange cool front that followed the hurricane. Our neighbors had power and let us "steal" some, and they kept milk and stuff in their garage fridge for us. So, hopefully this is for real this time, and it won't go back off again. About half of Houston is still without power with no end in sight, so we are lucky. Keep praying for those people and all the workers!

We Have Power!!

That is right, I guess 5 days is similar to 2-4 weeks. I am not complaining, we have power!! We are heading home today and can't wait. We still might have "rolling blackouts" as the power comes back online, but we have power!!

The Aftermath

So, we made it home, and we were pleasantly surprised by our house. Everything was in pretty good shape, even the inside did not have water inside of it somewhere that our friends couldn't see. The fridge wasn't even totally thawed. There was a huge tree laying across the road in our street, the neighbors already had a chain saw and were taking matters into their own hands cutting it up and clearing it. That tree blocked the storm drain on the street during the storm and threatened to flood the neighbors house, but the entire street came together and were bucketing water out of the yard (in the middle of the hurricane) into the drain and saved the house from flooding. People are really coming together, it is great. The whole street was out cleaning and clearing, helping each other out. It is pretty funny though, we brought some coffee and ice for our neighbors and there was a little hoarding going on, people got the stuff and ran it into their house and didn't tell anyone they had whatever it was that we gave them. The other neighbor was walking around siphoning gas out of peoples cars (with permission) to keep his generator going. We all pooled our thawing food and had a huge block party bar-b-cue last night. Once we ate, we headed to Dallas to for stop number 2 on our hurrication. We have no power, and even though we are going to have unseasonably cool 85 degree days and 65 degree nights, the boys were pretty freaked out by not having power. The electric company is estimating 2-4 weeks for power. That is a long time. So we know we can't stay there. It was funny because we were more in the dark (no pun intended) about what was going on in town once we were there. There are no tvs, cell phones don't really work, so no one had any information. We couldn't even get in touch with friends who we know are just a couple miles down the street. It was all very surreal. We were to Corsicana last night about 200 miles from the coast before we saw reliable power. Before then, we only saw a few little pockets of electricity here and there.

So, we are safe, and we will post pictures when we can.

Hurricane Ike

So, we are still safe, dry, and with electricity. We evacuated to my sister's house, and it was a great decision. They never lost power and the wind was nothing compared to what we would have had in Houston. I even got to work for a few hours today. It was sooo sad, the first maybe 10 people were all from Houston, and most didn't have any idea what condition their homes were in. I could obviously commisurate with them, but thanks to some of our great friends who stayed behind, we knew that our house had weathered the storm pretty well. So hopefully we can go home tomorrow and see our house for ourselves. After that, we have no idea. We have no idea when we will get power back or when downtown will be reopened so that Chris can go back to work. But, the most important thing is that we are safe and there is not a tree fallen in the middle of our house. Thanks for all your prayers. Will update again when I can.

A little Hurrication of our own

Well, we did it, we left. We didn't have too, but we figured hurricane force winds and no power for an extended period of time was not what we wanted to do. We picked up Brandon from school and headed to my sister's house. We won't escape the wind or rain, but at least it won't be as bad as it would have been at home. The kids are in heaven playing with their cousins. They think we came here just for fun. We are praying for everyone, be safe, stay cool, stay dry.

Boy, What a Day

Or, What a BOY Day. Brandon's favorite friend Caleb had his birthday party today. Caleb is a HUGE Astros fan, and his party was at Minute Maid Park. It was so cool! The party started out in one of the private suites overlooking the field, then we got to walk around on the club level a little bit and learn about how baseballs and bats are made. Ryan sat so still and listened so hard to everything the lady was telling him, he so bad wanted to do everything just like the big kids were doing. Then, the highlight of the day (for the adults anyway), we got to go on the field and sit in the dugouts, run the track, go in the bull pen, and take pictures from home plate. I don't think the kids appreciated it as much as Chris and I, but it was really cool. Then they got to play in the indoor play area for the rest of the party. What a great day. We were exhausted when we left.

Then when we got home, our neighbor just bought a convertible BMW. Brandon thinks anything without a roof is a sports car, so the neighbor took them out for a drive in the car. He let Brandon push the button to put the roof down, and I think Brandon said "Awesome" about 50 times before they had even pulled away. So baseball and sportscars, what a boy day!

It's Official

I am a soccer mom. With the exception that my kids don't play soccer. But, I drive a suburban, I live in a perfect suburban community, and all I do all day long is drive my children back and forth to school and acitivities. The boys started preschool this week, and they go at different times, one in the am and one in the pm. So, my day goes something like, drop Ryan off, go pick him up, go grab lunch in the few minutes off, go drop Brandon off, hope Ryan takes a nap, oh well, he didn't, go pick up Brandon. Fortunately the preschool is only a few minutes from our house, and next week will be better because they will have more regular hours, but man, how to people with more than a couple kids do this?

They have really enjoyed their first week of school. Brandon was so excited to be back, and wants to be there all day long, maybe we should have started him in Kindergarten. Oh well, this year will be good for him. And Ryan is so funny, he is in the Robin class and got to be the "pet helper" this week, so all he has talked about is feeding the mouse. I love their school, so I am happy to have them back to a little bit of a routine. Oh, and less than 6 weeks until Disneyworld!!!

I-Keee-Ahhh and Hurication

So we went to Ikea this weekend, the boys were so happy. They love Ikea, as we were driving, they spotted the big blue sign with the yellow letters and got all excited, there it is, there it is. I have no idea why they like Ikea so much, but they do, Ryan used to ask to go there when he was only 2. So, if you want to entertain my boys, tell them you will take them to Ikea, they will love you forever.

Our friends Joey and Laurie are in town for a little "hurication" as they call it. They evacuated from NOLA on Saturday and came to Texas. There have been many tense moments of watching the Weather Channel and the news waiting for the worst case scenario, but thankfully, it looks like the storm was not enough to damage the city. It is funny because before I knew them, we didn't know a single person from New Orleans, had never been there, just didn't know any different. So when Katrina hit, of course it was sad, but I didn't have any connection to the city. Now that my good friends are back there and I have been multiple times, I have come to love that place, and was so worried that something really bad would happen again. I am very thankful that this was not the case, but I am glad my friends had a place to go this time and ride out the storm. We had a big party last night with several friends and some other folks who also evacuated from NOLA, it was nice to see every here laughing and relaxed.

The weekend has not been without incident. Amelia fell on the table in our living room and split her cheek open. They then spent the next 7 hours in the ER waiting to stitch it up. I told Laurie she did it on purpose so she would stop worrying about the storm, but I felt really bad that she got hurt. Five stitches later, all is well, and Amelia is showing off her "bobo" to anyone who gets near her. What a weekend it has been. I hope you all are enjoying some good grilling and fun on this Labor Day Holiday!!