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.