Babies Worried About Santa

On early Saturday morning one week ago (Sept 13th--our 5-year wedding anniversary), Hurricane Ike came roaring through the Galveston/Houston area with Pearland firmly planted within the heart of the storm for 6+ hours.  We hunkered down at home and emerged without injury, but lost our chimney in the process.  Bad news:  We have a big hole in our roof and significant water damage in the ceiling / walls.  Good news:  We have an excuse to minimize Christmas presents this year since Santa might not have a route to follow.

When the chimney ripped off (around 2 am), we believed that a tornado might have been afoot.  We grabbed the babies and ran into our master closet--thankful for the big suburban development trend of closets the size of bedrooms.  The babies were fine--they would have kept sleeping if we had allowed them.  They didn't much like the dark windowless closet, especially while Mike and I were busy running around the house catching water from the ceiling and the windows.  At dawn, we could assess the damage and saw that our chimney was now on our back patio.  We lost a little portion of our fence as well, but all in all we fared fine (especially compared to the devastation along the coast).  Walking around our neighborhood, we noticed very little window damage but quite a bit of roof damage (mainly loss of shingles).  On the bright side, we met numerous neighbors as we helped pull out carpet (from failed ceilings due to water leakage) and cut downed trees.  Another positive is that Mike overcame his fear of heights and helped others' with their roofs. 

We miraculously got our power back that Saturday evening.  Since some of our close friends didn't have power, we had numerous fun work/play-dates with a bunch of babies, and one well on her way.

In other news:

• We went on our second trip to Utah with JJ and Alexis, which included an inaugural camping trip (that was unfortunately rained/snowed out after one night), multiple hikes up the Wasatch mountains, and many visits with family and friends.
• We are plugging along on feeding them solids--which involves a whole lot of mess!  So far, they've tried avocado, banana, apple sauce, sweet potatoes, mashed russet potatoes, carrots, peaches, plums, and cereal.  We're making our own baby food, which is a lot of fun--this weekend we'll try acorn squash and green beans.
• They are sitting up independently now and are showing a few signs of mobility--though I think crawling is still a ways away.  JJ rolls his way across the floor and Alexis either rolls or scoots on her back.  In Utah, we initially had one pack-n-play.  We started with JJ on the floor and Alexis in the PnP, only to reverse after JJ rolled himself into a closet.  After we switched and put Alexis on a blanket on the floor to sleep and JJ in the PnP, we came back a little later to find Alexis behind the TV stand, fast asleep.  We quickly borrowed another PnP from my sister Christina.

We uploaded the latest pictures and videos to Dropshots, have fun looking!