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Hi. I haven't posted here in a while because I've been doing quick updates on facebook instead. I'd love to share my stories with you, but it looks like Facebook is the way for me to keep updated the easiest. Please sign up to be my friend there so you can get my status updates and pictures. If you want to use a fake name so that others won't find you, just let me know privately and I'll accept you as a friend. Thanks!! www.facebook.com. Search for my email address: rebeccalaymon@gmail.com.

Grant's a Man!

Just zoom in really really really really REALLY REALLY REALLY close and you will see Grant's underarm hair. He keeps showing me and telling me what a man he is!

Happy Easter

Happy Easter!

Easter Egg Hunt

Kate is going Global with DI

Kate is in a Destination Imagination team that won 1st place and went to State. At State, they won 2nd place and are now going to Global in May.

Changing Schools!!

I registered Clark for Kindergarten last week. I also registered Kate for 6th grade the week before. Our lives are changing quickly.

After the hurricane... Monday 9/15/08

From Sunday to Monday night, we had another stormy night. This one was a cold front. I think I could have handled no power with as cool as it got.

We went back to the office to see how much more it had rained (inside). It was not pretty.

We worked hard on removing what we could from the office. We also started looking at new possibilities to office out of... the old place will have to be gutted and re-done, so that's not really an option. We will have to find somewhere new.

We had more laundry being done at our house and others coming over to check their emails. I realized that night that I'd better start on my own laundry because I was running out of towels.

We had Jennifer with Sustainable Living come over and just start removing the branches from our yard before we even noticed she was there. She was awesome and came over with her husband to take the branches away and chip them up. Thank you Jennifer!!!

At dinner time, Jason ran by our partner's house to get 4 computers so that people could work from our house. I started the kids eating and ran out on the roof to clean the gutters out so that I could get to work sweeping the driveway. My kids came to Grant's window to chat and I even heard that the dog ended up on the roof while I was on the other side of a gable. Thanks Grant for getting her back in quickly before she was hurt.

The kids all came outside and helped me sweep up. As soon as Jason got home, Kate and I took off to see her friend Madison...

That night when we went to see Madison, I felt so bad because there was power on their street that ended just a few houses before their house. So, they were without power, but we had to see Madison because the night before, Madison was attacked by a neighbor's bull dog.

Madison had been cuddling with her pet bunny, so they think that when she went down to pet the dog, the dog smelled the rabbit and attacked. Madison had 30 stitches by her eye, but thankfully missed the eye by a centimeter. She also had 8 stitches on her throat. (I took this picture the following Sunday when Madison looked much better.)

We were glad to get to see Madison to check on her AND, I had the important role of bringing her mom a stash of Peanut M&M's that she did not realize she needed until I brought them. I'd found them at an open gas station (one without any gas, but they had M&M's, so we were good).

BTW, that night Courtney brought me the last bag of Peanut M&M's from HEB, but told me they were all out of my other favorite, Big Red. What's up with that?!? Who runs out of Big Red?!

When Kate and I got back, I sent her to bed and Jason and I got busy cleaning up the front room so that we could set up for the workers. My friend, Marcy was nice enough to buy me some more folding tables when she was out waiting in line to shop, so we set it up like a good scrapbooker's dream...

A powerful day... Sunday 9/14/08

When we went to bed that Saturday night, I asked Jason to please turn on the fan... it was hot. He said, "ok", but he obviously didn't do it... something about no electricity seemed to stop him. Whatever.

So, we woke up to another hot morning. But, early that morning, we were offered a generator by our next door neighbor's parents who had power. It was so awesome. We were able to plug in the fridge, freezer, and a fan. It was great. Thank you Kelly's parents!!!

After that, Jason went over to our partner's house to work on setting up the computers. Amazingly, after being rained on, they were all working. We still plan on writing them off with the insurance company because we don't know when they will stop working, but in the meantime, people can get their info off the computers.

Back at home, the kids asked me to teach them how to play Monopoly. I said, "Sure. Today is a great day to learn Monopoly!!" Really, what else would you do when the power is out?!

As we were playing the power came back on!!! It was so cool... literally... the air conditioner worked and everything! Woo Hoo!! The only things I threw away were a half gallon of milk, some fish I had in the inside freezer that I had not realized was there, and all but 1 bottle of insulin (insulin stays good for 28 days not refrigerated).

That afternoon, we had several people come over to do laundry. One of the people that came over was Penny's family. Penny used to live 2 doors down from us, but now lives across the neighborhood. Her sister, Amanda came over and chilled out (again, literally... AC is so cool!!). I made her a mocha, gave her some wine, and she settled down to watch TV (awesome experience), read a book, etc. While she was here, I ended up bringing her 3 kids & 2 of Penny's kids over to play. While they were all having a blast, I went to work.

While I was running around, I decided not to stop for gas... here's a picture of the line at WalMart (and this was typical for any gas station that had gas):

Instead, I went to Home Depot to buy tables for John's house for the people to work on. In order to get in to the store, I had to stand in line. They were letting about 10 people at a time get in the store. I think this was because they were on a skeleton crew and that's all the people they could handle at a time.

When I brought the tables to our partner's house, I was laughing and told them that they had obviously never been on a scrapbooking retreat because at a retreat, each person would have their own 6 foot table with room for a computer, workspace, and with snacks in the middle. They agreed that they had never been on a scrapbook retreat and were trying to squeeze a lot of people into a small space. I laughed and left because I could tell they didn't want it set up like a scrapbookers paradise. Hah!

By that evening, we had made it through to getting power, so in case you are wondering...here's the verdict... a few M&M's to spare...

Ike LOVED the office 8pm 9/13/08

In the afternoon, I recommended that Jason call the landlord so that he could tell us when power would be back on. (As many of you know, we started a company back in October 2002 of Integrity Structural Corp. Jason is the head engineer. I'm the behind the scenes helper that goes into the office to do extra things when they are needed.)

At 8pm, we got a call from the landlord at the office... but it wasn't about power. It was to tell us the roof had blown off the building and we should check out the damage. A curfew was in effect, but who cared?! Jason went to the office. I followed behind him about 30 minutes later with the camera and video camera. Thanks neighbors for checking on the kids and Mom & Dad for chatting with the kids on the phone. Here's a picture of part of the roof (I heard the 7000 lb AC unit is no longer on the roof, but is now in the field next to the office):

Here's some pictures from the office (we are renters on the first floor of a 2 story office building):

Walking around in the water... it hadn't even rained for probably 12-15 hours at this point, but we were sloshing through 2 inches of rain in parts. We quickly pulled the 13 remaining computers out of the office.See the rain coming down the walls?!About 80 hours of work was ruined on each of 12 desks.Things were just thrown off the desks by the ceiling tiles collapsing: This trash can was put out after the hurricane before the cold front blew in. So, we knew there was a continuous rain pour in the office. (This was on top of the desk in the picture above.)

All this destruction is sad...Here's the upstairs hallway looking down where the office used to be before we moved it downstairs:

Here's a bad picture into the destruction of suite 215:

See the ceiling in that old office (suite 215)... showing how it could have been worse:

I just wish I could bottle the smell of the office so you could fully appreciate the mess. Yuck.

So, what would you do without power for 35 hours?! 9/13/08

After the hurricane hit, we hung out, read, & us parents slept while the kids played. We played with fun lights since the only power we had was God's power. (Thoughts from VBS this past summer when we did a power lab.)
Of course, Grant wanted to eat first. (He loves to eat.)
Play with flashlights to help the dog burn off energy. (She likes to chase the light.)
Note on the door of the playroom:
The kids ended up making things at their new art desk... Alyssa calls it her office... and then they sold the things to each other to raise money to clean up the place after the hurricane hit. I don't know how much they ended up raising or who they plan to give it to, but I thought it was a nice thought.

By mid-day, we figured we would not have power for quite a while and were looking forward to some good quality family time together...

Damage from the hurricane 9/13/08

The night of the hurricane, I fell asleep with the tv on about 12:30am Saturday morning. I woke up about an hour later when I heard the power flicker. I quickly got up to unplug the TV so that there wouldn't be extra surges to the tv. The power flickered that one time, but was off for good shortly after that.

At 3:30am, Jason, Kate, and I woke up because we heard a loud noise. It turned out to be the 450 pound grill tipping over. It's kinda funny because we bought that heavy grill because we were sick of the smaller ones tipping over in rain storms. Who would have guessed that this one would flip to?! (We were able to pick it up and get it going again. Which was great because we needed to cook on it.)

It was such a bad wind that the fence behind the grill is now leaning over quite a bit. The gate has been hard to open for a couple of years -- you have to lift up the handle to open it. So, Jason took a string to close it. We don't have to worry about that now. We had other minor fence issues:

The top gutter piece fell off:

Lots of branches down in the front...

By the time we threw most of them off the driveway, this is how big the pile was:

Our next door neighbor lost more fence than we did: Behind us, a neighbor lost a big willow tree.

After 3:30am, I kept waking up because Jason was getting text messages from his brother John and our business partner John. They were coming starting at 5:45am about every 15-30 minutes. I didn't know what noise was waking me up, but after I actually woke up and Jason told me why his phone kept going off, I thought it was nice of them to check up on each other.

We finally got up around 7am.

The hurricane reminded me of the time a few years ago when we went tent camping with our church and a tornado came within a mile of our tent. We felt somewhat safe in the house/tent, but kept wondering if we should wake up enough to get to a safer place.

Bedtime during the hurricane 9/12/08

Good Night... Everyone is headed to bed after a beautiful sunset. The wind has started to blow, the clouds are making circles in the sky. We've worked hard to prepare for Ike to come visit...

As Clark says, what's that H-thing... Oh yeah, the hurricane. I heard him in his room talking outloud all by himself... Dear God, could you please make this hurricane not come. You didn't really make it, did you?!

Clark also thinks we should be headed to Monkey Business for Adam's birthday party. Not tonight, Clark. Our sleepover in the living room...
We put mattresses against the windows...
Our pantry is our safe place if we need to go to an interior place. The kids want Peanut to go with us, but I think she'll have to go to the laundry room.
We did laundry and unplugged everything we could...All the dishes are washed... (we may not have water or electricity)

We turned the thermostat to 70 to try and cool it off in case we lose power...Bathtubs are filled, including saran wrap coated with vaseline to help make sure the stopper works tight...

Ice has been emptied and put in the freezer.

Extra water and food was bought... but I was appalled by the one item the stores had run out of that I needed...chocolate covered almonds.

I ended up calling my neighbor, Kelly, who I knew still needed to go the store, and asked her to buy a huge bag of peanut M&M's so that I could make it through the storm. Apparently, I'm sharing them with Jason because he keeps eating them. :) I'm terrible and put them in this red bucket so that I don't have an M&M bag sitting on the counter for the kids to see.We did a few more things, including, of course, making sure everyone is clean now in case we lose power and electricity. But, the part that cracks me up is that I decided to straighten my hair... afterall, if I don't have electricity, how would I fix my hair. As if it even matters... if it's hot, my hair will be in a ponytail looking terrible. AND, I didn't even fix my hair most of this week anyways, I just threw it in a ponytail. BUT, it is the fact that I might not be able to fix it!!! Good night. I'm going to go try and get a good night sleep with my family!!

Does the hurricane have wind? 3pm 9/12/08

Not very much yet. I'm sure we'll have a ton later, but we decided to try it out for now to see what kind of wind we could find... you'll notice we had to hold the kites kinda close to get them to fly.
...and exercise the dog while we were at it... she's almost like a kite!?!


NOTE: We tried again at 6pm and although we could get the kites higher, the wind is not constant, so we still couldn't fly kites.