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.