September 15th - So fortunate

We are really so fortunate. Things could be so much worse. In the end, the eye of the storm ended up travelling just east of us, putting us on the "clean" side of the storm. Still, you see the effects of the storm EVERYWHERE. Lots of stop lights are missing, or hanging by a cable, or knocked down. Even those on poles are often bent around 45 degrees, so they are no longer facing the right direction.

At our house, part of our front gutter system fell down, branches and leaves were down, sections of our fence are down, and our play house was ripped apart and found in a ditch way back behind our house. Part of the roof of the playhouse is missing. Who knows where it ended up.

September 14th - Hurrivacation Day 3

This was our last morning at the Baccus-Hope house in Austin, Texas and the kids made the most of it - playing with their cousins. Charlie had woken up throughout the night throwing up, so we were pretty exhausted. Charlie was completely recovered by morning, though. He ran around with the rest of the kids like nothing was wrong.

We really can't thank Daniel and Leslie enough for letting us take over half of their house for three days. We had such a great time!

So it was time to head back in the direction of Houston, but we knew that our house didn't have power yet, so we spent the night at Nana and Papa's house - halfway between Austin and Houston. Nana and Jack even made some banana bread, which was quite good.

September 13th - Hurrivacation Day 2

Charlie was happy to learn today that Daniel was going to spend the entire day with us. Charlie was all about Daniel. The first morning after we woke up at their house, the first thing Charlie said when he emerged from the bedroom is, "Where Daniel?" Luckily, we got to see Daniel for a couple of minutes before he headed off to work. Then Charlie would sadly say, "Daniel work." Today no one worked. We went to the Austin zoo, which was fun because you could feed some of the animals.

After the zoo, we went to a place called the Grove, which is a big playground surrounded by different eateries. We had a quick dinner and then watched the kids run around and climb all over the place. Leslie caught some great shots of Charlie in concentration mode - with his tongue hanging out. Too funny!

The evening ended with a big group bath and then wet kids running around the house making animal noises.

September 12th - Hurrivacation Day 1

On the first day of our hurri-vacation, we tried to go to the botanical gardens to see a cool dinosaur display, but it was closed, so instead we went to a nearby playground. It was pretty hot, though, so after a bit we packed it in and went to dinner. We went to a great burger place called Phils, which was right next to an Amy's ice cream place with an adjoining playground.

By the time we got home that night, the storm surge had already begun.

September 5-7 - Little Brown Bear

Jack was the kid of the week for the first week of school which meant that he got to be the line leader all week. It also meant that Jack got to bring home Little Brown Bear for the weekend. He was supposed to return with the bear the next week and talk about where they went and what they did together. I made a little picture book so Jack could tell his class about the weekend. Unfortunately, Jack was sick on Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday was a very busy day, and then Thursday we evacuated from the hurricane.

September 19th - The Road to Recovery

Things are still good in the Baccus house. Ronny has done a lot of work clearing leaves and branches, and getting the downed fence stacked up. We still are counting our blessings that our property wasn't further damaged. There are certainly a lot of people out there who aren't quite as fortunate. Most of our friends seemed to have fared as well as we did.

We no longer have to boil our water and more and more places have power. There are still plenty that don't. Earlier in the week, we stopped at a distribution point and got a couple bags of ice, a case of bottled water, and a case of MREs. We didn't really need to food, but I couldn't resist getting a case of MREs. Ronny and I picked each picked out an MRE to have for dinner. I have to say, my jambalaya tasted like dog food. Ronny's beef enchiladas were a strange texture with a stranger sauce, but his refried beans were pretty good. The drinks and desserts were OK in each pack. MRE's have 1200-1300 calories, so I guess if half of it tastes too bad to eat, you are still getting enough calories for a full meal.

Ronny and Jack went grocery shopping a few days ago. There were limits on how much meat and milk you could get and I think they got the last loaf of bread. The lines weren't too long, though, and we were thrilled to have milk and cheese again. I'm hoping to restock later today and maybe even get some eggs.

Driving around is a bit sad. Today I saw a newly cut tree stump that was about 20" in diameter. That's quite a big tree to fall. Most of the fallen trees are the tall pine trees. Some are snapped off in the middle of the trunk. I don't think I will be planting any of those in my yard anytime soon. On Wednesday, we drove around the lake and saw boats all over the places - in parking lots, on sidewalks, sunk in the marinas.

Getting around is a bit of a challenge with most of the stoplights still not working. We are quickly learning which intersections to avoid.

Yesterday, we all went to the Downtown Aquarium. I saw online that they were offering $5 tickets to see all of the attractions. Our wristbands said, "Ike Promo". We went on a shark train ride, rode the carousel, had lunch in front of a 150,000 gallon fish tank, and toured through the aquarium adventure, which ends with a white tiger. It was a fun couple of hours.

This morning we went to Monkey N Around. The boys enjoyed getting out of the house and playing with a new set of toys. We went to Double Dave's pizza buffet afterwards and Charlie scarfed down several pieces of pizza, while Jack Sprat ate some pizza crust. Strange kid.

September 15th - Ike Status

We are home. We have power. We have water.

Yesterday we had hopes of returning home and at least checking out our house. We said our goodbyes to Leslie, Daniel, Camilla, and Violet and headed to New Ulm, Texas to see Nana and Papa. New Ulm is about halfway between Austin and where we live in Houston. Our plan was to leave the kids with Nana and Papa and go check on the house. We knew that we didn't have power yet, so we had already planned to spend the night at Nana and Papa's house. We got on the state highway to get to I-10 and about 5 miles away from I-10 we got stuck in bumper to bumper traffic. That wasn't part of our plan. Eventually we turned around and went back to spend a nice evening with Nana, Papa, and Melanie.

Right before we went to bed, I got a text message from my neighbor that the power was back on. Yippee! We slept well knowing that we were headed home in the morning to a house with power. Or so we thought. We got another text around 8am saying that our neighbor had power, but we did not. We decided to head home anyway with the hopes that our power would be on by the time we got here.

The drive was fine - not too much traffic. On our way into Houston, we started to see signs blown out, telephone lines leaning over, tree limbs down, and billboards down. As we got further into town, we started seeing some blown out windows on a couple of buildings and neighborhoods with lots of damaged roofs and fences. We would drive by grocery stores and gas stations. The parking lots would be PACKED with a line of cars waiting to get in. We have a full tank of gas, so that won't be a problem for us. I'm not sure when we will need to go grocery shopping again. Hopefully the lines will be down by the time we need anything.

We only saw one operational stoplight during our journey through Houston. Some were missing or hanging by a thread. Most cars were good at treating it as a 4-way stop, but not all. On our way to our neighborhood, we saw lots of downed trees on the main road, but our neighborhood and our street in particular seem to have fared well. Our house is fine other than a gutter that fell down and several sections of fence that are down. Our kids plastic play house was by the back fence that is knocked down and I found most of it in a drainage ditch behind the house. I'm not sure if it is recoverable.

The water from the ice machine leaked onto the floor and some water came under the front door, but that's all I've seen so far inside.

The kids have been happy throughout this whole ordeal - especially when we were staying with Camilla and Violet. When we left Camilla told Ronny, "I'm going to miss you." Ronny said, "I'm going to miss you too." Camilla responded, "I'm going to miss Jack more." Ronny was OK with that.

I hope to catch up on posting pictures soon, but I thought it was most important to get this information out in case anyone was concerned. All is well in the Baccus household. :) Thanks for all of the thoughts and prayers!

September 13th - Ike status

I've talked to a few people in our neighborhood who say that our house is fine - particularly the windows and the roof. There are some limbs down and apparently part of our fence is down as well. All in all it seems like we have escaped the worst of it. There was no flooding in our neighborhood. We have heard reports that some houses in our neighborhood have had water coming in under his windows and doors, so we still might have a little clean up to do when we get home.

There is currently no power in our neighborhood and the water pressure is very low. The city is advising people to boil their water. I would love to go home and see if there is any damage inside, but I don't really want to sleep there without power.

In the meantime, the boys have been having a lot of fun playing with their cousins. We expected heavy rain and winds here in Austin, but now they are predicting only a 30% chance of rain, so we might not even get a drop. After Charlie wakes up from his nap we will probably get out of the house and go play somewhere.

September 12th - Hurricane Ike

So for anyone worried about the Baccus Family, we are not in Houston. Yesterday morning, I looked at the most recent predicted paths for Hurricane Ike and then I went into the living room, sat next to Ronny and calmly said, "I think we need to run for our lives." So we spent the morning getting ready. Ronny packed as much of our outside toys into the garage with the grill and the cars. I did laundry because we might lose power. Partway through the morning, they announced on the news that we were in a mandatory evacuation zone. We packed up our photo albums, cameras, computers, hard drives, important documents and 5-days worth of stuff for all of us. Then around 1pm we headed for Austin to stay with the Baccus-Hope family. We owe them so much for taking us in. We have almost completely overrun their small space. The four of them are in one bedroom and the four of us are in the other bedroom.

We made the same evacuation about 3 years ago for Hurricane Rita, which ended up hitting east of Houston in the Beaumont area. The evacuation was a mess. It was only a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans and after seeing the destruction and lives lost, Houstonians didn't want to take any chances so EVERYONE tried to evacuate at the same time. It took us almost 20 hours to make the trip to Austin, which should have taken about 3.5 hours. It was insane.

Jack was about 11-months old, then. We left after dark thinking that Jack could sleep through the drive. Little did we know that we wouldn't make it to Austin until 3:30pm the next day. Every so often Jack would wake up crying, so I would crawl into our crowded backseat and take him out of his car seat and hold him for a bit. We were only moving about 2 mph, so I figured he wasn't at any risk, but it still felt weird taking him out of his car seat with the car in motion. Apparently during Hurricane Rita, our neighborhood never lost power and I'm not sure if we even got any rain. There were some branches down, but it was nothing serious.

So here we are, in Austin, all four kids are in bed, and we are watching the hurricane show on TV - mostly on the Weather Channel. They seem to be expecting some pretty scary things - storm surge up to 30 feet (a storm tsunami, they say), up to 1 million people without power, 100,000 homes flood-damaged. They are even expecting tropical winds in Austin, so we could lose power here tomorrow as well. We went out shopping to get some supplies like flashlights at Target and the lanterns (in camping) and flashlights (in hardware) were pretty well cleaned out. They had some $30 LED flashlights, but that was a bit more than I wanted to spend. So I checked out the Halloween department and sure enough, there were orange and black flashlights including batteries - 2 for $4. Now that's better.

The weather here is still nice. We'll see how it all plays out. Say a little prayer for us please.