brian's birthday, new car and ballet

brian turned 31 last monday. our big splurge was a new car!!! we traded in our trusty little honda cr-v and got a 2005 ford expedition. i will take a picture of it soon and post it, but it is so pretty... it's blue with gold trim. we really love it. it's so much roomier than the cr-v and although it is a gas guzzler, we feel like it's just right for us right now. it also motivated us to clean out the garage so we can actually park it in there at night. it was kinda a spontaneous decision, but we knew the cr-v was too small for 3 carseats and we knew within the next few weeks a lot of hurricane damaged cars would probably be showing up on used car lots, so we prayed about it and decided to go see if we could find a deal that was in our price range. God blessed us and we found something even better than we ever expected we would be able to afford. we are so thankful and excited about it.

anyway enough about the car. we also started back to school on tuesday. thankfully the kids were ready to be back and got right back into the routine. our FCA meeting thursday was awesome... the officers knew of a college-age worship band that they invited to come play for our meeting. they were so awesome! we had about 70 kids come out and worship God together that morning. our FCA group also sponsored "see you at the pole" on wednesday and we all gathered around our school's flagpole, sang worship songs and prayed. i cannot express how humbling it is to see these high school kids who are so passionate about God, they don't care what their peers think about them. they just love the Lord. i am so humbled and excited to be "leading" this group this year.

one more thing about school... our varsity football players started a new tradition this year where they choose their favorite teacher to wear their football jersey all day on friday, then the teacher turns it in at the end of the day for the football player to wear to the game that night. well, yesterday, one of my football players picked me! i must admit it was really fun to wear his football jersey all day friday (half-day for me). and we won the game last night! yeah!

lastly, avery started her first ballet/tap class this morning at the Y. she was so nervous before we left, she even cried and said she didn't want to go, even though she's been dancing around in her tap shoes for the past month waiting for class to start. anyway, i just prayed that she would be at peace and have fun. when we walked up to the door, one of her friends from mother's day out is in her ballet/tap class!!! avery was completely at peace once she saw celeste, and she had a blast. she came home tip-toeing, curtsy-ing and doing the chicken dance for us. and she looked so stinkin' cute in her little leotard!

avery the ballerina (in her tap shoes)

sweet tatum the climber (her face has healed up almost completely since her fall last week)

pictures of our week

here's some pictures we took of our yard today while we cleaned up. it doesn't look too bad in the first one, but the second one is all the tree branches/pine cones that we already picked up.


this is the section of our backyard fence that fell over. the right is our yard, the left is our back neighbor's yard. it would be flat on the ground, but we propped it up with a stick so brian could try to fix it. we found out the fence posts snapped, so we need to buy a couple new ones as soon as lowe's or home depot gets re-stocked. brian was able to re-attach it temporarily so the dogs are safe in our yard.


while brian & i worked in the front yard, we let the girls drive up and down the street. they usually love this ... brian hooks up the wagon to avery's princess car and she pulls tatum around. this picture was from a couple weeks ago so you can get the idea.

well today tatum was not so content and she tried to get out all by herself. i know we should've taken more safety precautions, but they have done this alot and been just fine. today, though, tatum face-planted into the street. poor thing, she had pavement in her cheek! i cleaned it out as gently as possible and we covered it in neosporin all day. it didn't seem to bother her after the initial shock, but her cheek was really swollen and obviously scraped up. i am so thankful that was all that happened from her fall, it could've been much worse. we learned our lesson.


i never got around to posting pictures from avery's first day of "school", aka mother's day out. this is her that afternoon after i picked her up. she is sitting on our new sandbox cover brian built on labor day, which we love. of course, she is holding lightning & mater, the two little cars that she is never without these days. who would've thought a little girl could love two toy cars so much?!!

two sweet sisters!!!

that's all for now. i'm going to bed!!!

God is good

we are home. our home is safe and dry. our home has power and water. God is so good.

we had a great time in SA...sometimes unplanned trips are the best! my dad's 62nd birthday was yesterday, so we got to help him celebrate it. my mom helped us pick out some cute stuff for the baby's room, which we are so excited about. brian's brother, brent & his wife, jenn, live in new braunfels, and they took us to a great park where we all rode a train and the girls got to play on the playground. overall a great weekend, despite our concerns about our home, city, friends, family, etc.

we called home from SA this morning and finally, around 11:00 am, our answering machine picked up! it was really an exciting moment, since we've been calling home every couple hours for the past three days hoping to hear it! we had already planned to eat lunch at the incredible pizza with my mom & brother matthew, so we went ahead and did... it was so much fun! chuck-e-cheese doesn't compare! brian took avery in a race car, we played putt-putt golf and lots of other games, and the food was really pretty good! then we packed up our stuff and headed east.

driving home today was really eerie. when we got into our area of town, we started noticing lots of trees down, tarps on people's roofs, streetlights not working or hanging to the ground, gas stations either vacant or having lines twenty cars long in front of them, not to mention it's cool and cloudy today, just an eerie feeling. when we turned into our neighborhood, the streetlight that hangs at the entrance had fallen and it's wire was hanging onto the street. brian had to steer around the wires so they wouldn't touch our car. our neighborhood just had all new fences put in along the main road, and half of them were down. lots of tarps on roofs. lots of trees and debris on the roads. it was indescribable. i kept gasping, brian just drove silently. finally i asked him, "have you ever seen anything like this?". he said something about an ice storm a long time ago in houston, but he said it wasn't this bad.

anyway, when we pulled up to our house, we just stared at it. we have one old pine tree and one old oak tree in our frontyard. both are still standing, but most of their branches were littered all over our yard. brian's sweet parents had come over yesterday and gathered up some of the branches and swept the driveway for us, but it's still just a huge mess. i carried avery into the backyard to find about a 15 foot section of our backyard fence down. lots of roof shingles were missing. when we went inside, the only thing we found was some water damage on avery's celing and our living room ceiling. no drips though, thankfully. i had to dump out pretty much everything in the fridge and freezer (power has been out since friday night), so i will need to do some serious grocery shopping tomorrow hopefully (most of the stores around here that do have power are only letting in 20 people at a time for only 10 minutes each - um, i need time to think when i shop, but oh well). anyway, we are so thankful for our home holding up so well.

on the drive home today, avery started coughing like a dog barking. when we finally got home and i got her out of her carseat, she was burning up! poor thing, i have no idea how she got sick that fast, but it appears she did. i put the humidifier in her room tonight. i just went into check on her while she's sleeping and her breathing sounds like an alligator! hopefully our doctors office is open tomorrow so i can get her in.

thankfully school doesn't start back up until thursday, so we have a couple days to clean things up and hopefully get back to normal. Thank you Jesus for being so good to us.

Y-IKE-S!!!

yes, i know i'm a dork. (read the title). well we're in san antonio, we came in thursday night once we found out school was cancelled for friday. we have, of course, been glued to the news here.
most of our family/friends in houston aren't getting any cell phone service so it's been hard getting updates. the power is out everywhere there and we're hearing it may not be back on for a week or more. we finally got in touch with brian's dad a few minutes ago... he went over to our house this morning to check things out. he said sections of our backyard fence was down and several sections of our roof shingles came off. hopefully water isn't leaking into our house. thankfully no windows are broken and none of our trees came down, that was what i was most worried about.
we are so sad for our city going through such a devastating time.
we might try to go back home tomorrow, but if the power isn't going to be back on for a few more days, we may wait it out here. i'll update more later. take care, all my fellow houstonians!

busy week!

well this week is going to be busy, but today it started off well. for the past couple months, me & three friends of mine have started doing a "Children Desiring God" Bible study with our preschoolers. Two of us teach the 5 preschoolers the lesson and two of us watch the 5 babies/toddlers in another area of the house. So far it has been great. avery has already memorized about 5 verses and learned so much from the bible stories. today it was our turn to host and the lesson was about Abram & Sarai being called to leave their country for a new land. anyway, after the lesson was over we fed the kids lunch & let them play outside for a while so us moms could visit. the kids found the baby powder and decided since tatum was the youngest one out there, she needed to be powdered. it occupied them for a good 30 minutes and tatum didn't mind all the attention so we just let them do it. tatum was covered... it was pretty hilarious!




tomorrow avery starts back to mother's day out. she seems excited so i am hopeful that it will be a great day for her. yesterday we had promotion sunday at church and she walked right into her new sunday school classroom and just started playing like such a big girl. she barely looked back at me to say goodbye. i am nothing but proud that she's gotten so big and so independent.

brian has officially finished his first master's degree class! praise God... one down and 14 more to go! i am so proud of him. he has been crazy busy lately with volleyball tournaments, writing papers for his master's, and just his regular teaching responsibilities (not to mention two girls who won't let him out of their sight when he's home), but he just trusts God to get him through it all, and i know HE will.

yesterday also was the re-opening of our sanctuary at our church. we've been meeting in the gym for the past 5 months while they renovated our sanctuary... and it was beautiful! it was a very emotional service for me. yes, i'm pregnant, so that may have had something to do with it, but i just balled my eyes out at every song we sang, every story that was told, every point our pastor made in his sermon. i am so thankful to God for how He's blessed us and taught us there for the past 4 years.

tonight i am supposed to take a meal to some friends who just had a brand new baby boy named Price, so i need to get to cookin'!

today was the day

i just need to take a minute for a huge sigh of relief... today was the day they fixed my 3rd period. two weeks into the school year already, but i'm not complaining. i showed up this morning to check my roster (it's been my morning ritual everyday since school started), and viola! yesterday's 39 kids was down to 24!!! and yesterday's 13 special ed kids was down to 7!!! where did all those children go? i have no idea, and i'm not asking around to find out. my class sizes are now manageable, and i actually had fun teaching today!

labor day weekend

Our weekend:
we started out the labor day weekend with no plans, and were OK with that. we were trying to think of something extra fun to do with the girls but not spending any money to do it, but we really hadn't thought of anything.

so we got a call on friday night from brian's coaching buddy's wife who asked if we got the e-vite for their daughter, macy's chuck-e-cheese birthday party the next morning. we didn't get the e-vite, so we had no idea about the party, but thankfully we had no plans, so we decided to go. i had heard parties there were torturous, so we braced ourselves. but the place was empty except for the 10-12 kids for macy's party, and our girls had a blast. avery's favorite game was, of course, the race cars that you get to drive (she's in love with lightning mcqueen right now). tatum liked riding the barney & teletubbies rides in the baby section. it tired them out, so they took a nice long nap that afternoon.

so brian went to work on his master's paper saturday afternoon, and i got a phone call from a friend in our sunday school class who had astros tickets for that night and they weren't able to use them. he said they were good seats & it included the parking pass, so did we want to use them? um, yes!!! so we got all decked out in our astros gear, loaded up the girls and went to minute maid park. we got to park right in front of the entrance and our seats were 5 rows back from the dugout! it was great! our astros hit lots of home runs, which was great b/c there's a big choo-choo train filled with oranges up on the rafters and it goes back & forth whenever we hit a homer! avery loved the train!!! and we won the game so it was a great night!

tatum's first astros game!!!

us girls "on the bench" (i think i was telling brian to just take the picture!)

i know this is a weird pictures of avery, but you can see how close we were to the action...
and we love hunter pence (#9 up to bat).

so our weekend turned out to be lots of fun. yesterday, brian spent the whole day building a nice cover for our sand box in the back yard. we are both thrilled to have that done. now the girls can play outside without being caked in sand everyday!!!

School:
okay, so my 3rd period is still huge, but at least it's down to 39 kids and only 15 are special ed. i got an email today saying it should be fixed by the end of this week, so i am still hoping every day will be the day. overall things have started off well with school. we have our first test friday over the frontier so that will be interesting.

The Girls:
a friend let us borrow her extra crib for the next year or so, so we put it in avery's room and have let tatum try to nap in there a few times. it's mostly for fun b/c they love "napping" in the same room... although they have yet to learn how to actually fall asleep in the same room. they have way too much fun laughing and talking to each other. so after an hour or so, i get tatum and go put her in her own room so they will both actually nap. any tips from you moms whose kids share rooms would be greatly appreciated. we're hoping by december to have tatum completely moved into avery's room and sleeping in there for nighttime & naptime. we'll see.

here's a picture of avery & brian at her first astros game back in the summer of 2006.
my, how she's changed!