SNOW!

yes, for all you disbelievers, it snows in houston. only once every 4 years, but still - SNOW. the first picture is of grant and i going outside before it snowed when the high was 32 degrees. poor guy, he's been sick and he wasn't having a good time. all he would say is "too cold! too cold!" we didn't stay out long. later that night it really started coming down in these huge beautiful flakes. it was even still around when we woke up. the roads were "icy" so jason worked from home in the morning and built us a fire and we ate homemade pancakes.

Family Pictures

our photographer did a great job - grant was having a bad day. i can't count how many times he said "no." he hates having a camera pointed at him. actually, he just hates doing anything we want him to do unless we convince him it's his idea. i guess that's life with a 2 year old. there were a few really cute moments, and i love the pictures of him and Jason. he loved the geese until they started chasing him.

Christmas Fun

we went to a local santa's farm. grant loved touching sheep, pigs, and cows. he never wanted to leave. (p.s. like grant's jacket? our neighbor gave it to us. go top gun!)







while grant was napping, jason and i decorated the tree. here's kitty helping.



grant loves the tree. he wants the lights on 24/7 (at least whenever he's awake) and he loves the ornaments. he points out all the ones he can see every 5 minutes.





cute holiday garland. i want you to appreciate that it took me FOREVER to make this, hours of cutting up small pieces of felt. i got the idea from the land of nod children's store. i figured i could make it for about $5, but i had no idea what i was in for effort-wise. but i love the end product and it was fun to do (i kinda miss thinking of new tree designs). i have a lot of left over felt, i wonder what else i could do with it...

fun pictures

grant loves making bread. he is fascinated by the mixer. his favorite part is punching down the dough and then tasting it.







other fun pictures of grant - he can ride his bike now! and he loves playing in the rain.

Happy Halloween!

my favorite time of year

i love this time of year in houston. the extreme heat is gone, and all that's left are beautiful, sunny, breezy days with incredible blue skies. it's great to go to the park, lay in the hammock, fly a kite, catch some bugs, or ride bikes. 

grant loves bugs. LOVES them. though the poor guy is always so disappointed when they don't fly away after being held by him (if only he didn't hold them so tight). grant is so close to being able to ride his tricycle. he's the youngest in the neighborhood and he's ready to be off and riding with the big kids.

grant showing me a bug he caught

view #1 from our hammock

view #2

ike

we survived the hurricane. we were only out of power for 7 days (originally we were told 4 weeks). while we had fun being creative with food (a lot of BBQ'ing and dutch oven dinners and eating food storage) and getting ready for bed and reading by candlelight (grant loved this, and his favorite was getting to blow out the candles), we were very grateful for electricity on day 7 (and not not have to listen to the generators anymore). even though the weather was awesome and it was fun hanging out with our friends and neighbors, let's hear it for the end of hurricane season (no more empty grocery store shelves and waiting in line for gas).






it was hard to sleep friday night with all the howling wind. we put grant to sleep in our closet, the safest place in our house, in case our house ripped in two. it was spooky to experience the calmness of the eye and then have the wind and rain return. the tree in the front of our house bent quite a bit in the wind but thankfully didn't break. grant loved watching movies with us on our portable dvd player while we waited for power to return. this radio was AWESOME (llbean) for listening to updates. to see more of the hurricane damage, our friends took awesome pictures around our community. go to http://mmproudfoot.blogspot.com/.

First Casualty for IKE in our neighborhood

So, this tree was struck by lightening a few months ago--leaving this tree very dead, and with a nice summer of beating sun and heat--very dry. I thought--hey, might as well take a before picture just in case right?
Well, after an hour or so, I went to check on it again and it was gone! I ran over with a few neighbors and found out it fell 10 minutes prior to my noticing it. This is one street away from our house and we have TWO very similar trees; one on our lot and another on our neighbor's.
AWESOME neighbors sprang into action to eliminate all related debris. It was gone in less than 20 minutes. GONE.




These are for Judy to see the nice clouds she loves to watch.