First post this year

I have been awful at keeping up with this blog and I'm going to try and work harder to keep it up to date. A lot has happened sense our last post (as it has been over a year). I don't want to spend my entire day writing so I will just highlight a few events this past year.

In September we experience our first Hurricane, Ike. We had some good friends that lived in a mandatory evacuation area come and stay with us. As the Hurricane approached my dad called telling us that he thought that we should also evacuate, we were out to dinner when he called. We all discussed what we should do and opted that we would find a hotel room further north. We came home to find that we had a leak in a wall and our house was not in a condition that we could leave it for an unknown amount of time. We changed our minds and opted to board up the house and stay. It was an experience of a life time that I would never want to relive. We were very blessed and only had minimal damage (we attributed that to the fact that my brother and our guests son had just went into the MTC a few days before the storm) . We had a fun time with our friends that evacuated to our house although we were a little cramped (we had 8 adults and 2 kids in out 1600 sqft house). We were also very lucky that we only had to go 17 hours with out power. There were only about 10 families in our ward that had power that soon. (we know people within a 1/2mile of our house that went 21 days without power).

We made a last min. trip to Utah for Christmas! It was so much fun. We decided that we should go because my moms entire family was going to be together for the first time in years. Eric's youngest brother had just went into the MCT a few days before we got to Utah and we felt that his mom would enjoy having us around as she was going to have an empty nest for Christmas.

In April my parents came to visit. We had so much fun. A few days into the trip we went down to the area that Eric and I grew up in to visit our friends that stayed with us during the Hurricane. Shortly after we arrived at their house it started raining. We didn't think much about it until my mom walked past the front window and saw our van covered it water. The insurrance declared it a total loss. It was kinda sad.

In July we opted to make another last min trip to Utah as we didn't really have anything keeping us home. Eric was not working for the summer and we were getting board being home all time so Eric suprised me for my birthday and said he would make the drive again. We got to spend about three weeks there and we bought Eric a truck, which he was so thrilled about.

Two weeks ago Eric's parents drove out his truck and stayed for a few days. The kids had so much fun with grandma and grandpa. They were in grandkid heaven for a few days. We are gearing up for school to start next week. Eric is still the Athletic Director at his middle school and he loves it. The girls and I are looking forward to another fun football season watching "daddy's boys" play twice a week. Allie will be starting preschool and is so excited to go. She asks every day how much longer until she gets to go to school. A few months ago as I was signing her up for preschool I was telling her about it and she looked at me and said "mommy I don't think I want to go to school, can't I just go work at Jack-in-the-box instead". It was really cute.