Chuy's

We went out for Mexican food at the new Chuy's restaurant off of Townsend BLVD last night. We had probably the best service I have ever had short of when Kelly and I ate at Three Forks in Dallas. That is a 5 star restaurant for those of you who are not familiar with it. Anyway, Addison's kiddie meal came with a push-up ice cream desert which she absolutely loved. I didn't have a real camera, so I used the one on my phone to take the picture below.

Halloween Library Day

Here are pictures of last Thursday. Only a few kids were dressed up.

After the library we went to McDonald's to have lunch. She loves french fries!!!

Pumpkin Patch

Today we went to a pumpkin patch that was held at a local church. At first, Addison was unsure of all the other people and pumpkins. We walked her around and she started to loosen up. She has a hard time walking on grass, therefore, one of us was holding her hand the whole time. Towards the end, she had to touch every pumpkin that we walked by. Here are a few pictures. She didn't want to smile in any of the pictures.

Ike Update Part Deux

Now that I have had some more time, I am posting pictures from the past weeks of what happened during and after hurricane Ike. Hopefully I can get these in the correct order.

Above and below are pictures taken during the storm. We went over to my parent's house since we lost power at ours three hours before the storm even hit.
There was a lot of flash flooding, but nothing ever came into the houses. There was a period of frequent high winds that the was worst of the storm.
We all stayed occupied during the storm, but Addison seemed to have the most fun.
After the storm cleared, we were able to venture out and see what happened. In the picture above the tree fell on the awning of the this store front.
In the above picture, there is a clump of trees that fell on the house.
Above is a picture of the fence in our back yard. The tree from the neighbor directly behind us fell into our yard, however, it did not hit the house. We have since chopped up the tree and the neighbor repaired the fence.
Above is the neighbor directly behind us. That tree is from his neighbor's yard. They had to have some roof repair done to fix all the holes. I'm glad I wasn't in that house when it fell.
Above is the same tree, the base of which hit the owner's house before hitting their neighbor's house. They also had some roof repairs to do.
Once again, Addison was having a grand old time walking all over the place and cooling off in her pool. We were out of power at our house for two weeks before we were finally able to return home. Luckily, my sister and parent's both received power before us and we were able to stay with them. Our area was not hit nearly as hard as most of the ones further south. We had natural gas and water the whole time, but not power. We were also rather lucky that our cell phones did function most of the time, however, our land line did work as well. We also ran into problems getting fuel. It was difficult to find a station that had both power and fuel at the same time. When you did, the lines would be 3/4 of a mile long just to fill up. Everything has been back to normal for a while now, and we are all impressed with how well Addison handled everything.

Addison Walking All Over The Place

Two new videos of Addison walking on her own:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3542447622039385458

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3814496599455561085

Post Hurricane Update

All of the family down here, including us, are fine. The only damage was a tree from a neighbor's yard that fell into our back yard. Nothing happened to the rent house. We are still without power, but are hoping to get it back before this weekend. We will try to upload some of the photos soon so you can see what happened in our area. Addison has been a real champ during this, despite the lack of air conditioning and disruption of her schedule.

Friday Afternoon Update

So today has been uneventful. We woke up and this is what it looked like .

You could hear our neighbors up and at it this morning, a few boarded up while others were bringing stuff from the outside, inside their houses.

We checked the news out and nothing had change. We then decided to go on a walk and I decided to document considering it is mine and Addison's first hurricane. I took some before shots. This is the sky.

This is our street. It was very humid but otherwise a very pretty day. We saw a few others out walking/running this morning. It seems like quite a few people stayed in town.

By now we were suppost to have tropical storm winds from the outer bands with winds around 35 mph. We haven't seen any of it so far. Galveston is already starting to flood and the hurricane is still pretty far from landing. The hurricane is a Category 2 but the water surge is a Category 4-5, 18-20 foot tall surge. They are saying they eye should hit Galveston as a Category 1, which is better than the Category 3 that was orginally predicted, but that can all change.

Here is a picture that was just taken from our house. The sky has been gray since around lunchtime. We had a little sprinkle that lasted about 3 minutes.

On the Addison front I took some pictures of her knee walking around the house today. They aren't the best pictures. Ignore the box in the background. I am working on clearing stuff out to donate to charity.

Pictures

Since I had the day off due to Hurricane Ike, I decided to upload all the pictures we have from March to now. There are over 200 pictures now on the shutterfly link. It took well over an hour to do, but what else what I going to do? The news is repetitive..."Hurricane Ike is coming to get you. Stay put. Have supplies. Streets are clogged...." blah blah blah.

Yes yes. Hurricane Ike is coming to get us. We had planned on going to Dallas for the weekend to visit the house, but Ike has changed those plans. According to the news, Galveston should see tropical storm winds, which is basically the bands of Ike, around 2pm tomorrow. I believe the hurricane winds are suppose to hit Galveston around 8-10pm tomorrow night and then the eye is suppose to hit around 2 am Saturday morning. We are about 2-3 hours behind Galveston. So we should see the tropical storm winds/weather sometime tomorrow late afternoon/evening. All of that can change overnight as we have seen before with these hurricanes.

I'm not really sure who all in our neighborhood is left. They told people that aren't in the mandatory evacuation zones (coastal areas) to stay put so the roads don't get clogged up, but you know people. They always want to leave the dangerzone ("highway to the danger zone..." sorry had to sing). We saw a few people loading up their cars and some were even boarding up their houses. All we did was go to the store and bring the stuff from outside inside. Oh, and we managed to make room in the garage to park Mike's car. Yeay! I went to the store today and it was packed. I was lucky to find a parking spot and a basket. They had plenty of stuff left on the shelves when I went around 930-10am. The lines were the longest part of that adventure. I stood in line for 30-45 minutes. Everyone was real nice and friendly considering we were all staying in the dangerzone :) When I left the store, people made up parking spots and were even parked in the street. I couldn't believe it. I was glad to be done with that part of my day.

We are on the "dirty" side which is where the damaging winds/tornadoes/rain/flooding comes from. The news is predicting most of the Houston area might see top wind speeds of 95-100 mph. I'm not thrilled about the winds. I would be okay with losing power, but I'm not okay with 100mph winds.

They are now saying that most of the beaches that is not protected by the seawall no longer have beaches. The beach water has raised about one foot so far and Ike is 400 miles out!!!

I don't have much else to say. Just keep us in your thoughts and prayers as we live through this Hurricane. This will be my first, and Addison as well (obviously). I will try to update our situation either through the blogger (as long as we have power) or just by keeping in touch with our families.

We love everyone. <3

Connor West

After our shower, we popped up to Oklahoma to see the newest addition to the West family, Connor. I forgot how small babies are when they are brand new!

Below is Addison meeting Connor while Stella holds him. I don't think she understood what he was, but she was nice anyway.


Above is Casey with Connor on his boppy pillow.
This is their storm shelter in their garage where they go if there is a tornado or other hazardous Oklahoma weather.

Dallas Wedding Shower and Oklahoma

We went to Dallas the weekend after 4th of July for a wedding shower for my buddy Dave Garner and his future wife Christine. We stayed with Kelly's mom, and Addison had a real blast.As seen above, Addison loves to play on couches. Her grandmother's couch had lots of fun things to play with and knock to the ground.


We dressed up Addison in a nice purple dress(her mother's favorite color) for the shower as you can see above and below.Addison had a great time at the party talking with everyone and zooming around.

Above is all of the A&M guys with Dave's future wife in the middle. It was especially good to see my friend CJ Burk(far left), who we had not seen in several years.
Addison liked the cowboy hats they had at the party for the bride and groom to wear. She really liked it when other people put them on and took them off.

Playing with DVD's

Addison has been discovering more and more things she can mess with around the house. The entertainment center has proven to be a lot of fun with all of the buttons, lights, and especially the DVD's. Below are a few shots of her helping to reorganize some of the DVD's.


Addison also likes to sit in her chair and have you bring her books and other toys .

Attempted Trip to the Zoo

Over the July 4th weekend we tried to sneak down to the Houston Zoo. It started pouring down rain on the way down there, so we went to the Aquarium instead. I had not been to the Houston Aquarium or Zoo in a long time, so it was interesting to go back there again. The aquarium had a rain forest theme to it, and it honestly didn't have near as much actual aquariums as I would have thought. They had a lot of other exotic animals there, but the lack of even a good sized shark tank left me disappointed. The place was also rather small with a decent weekend crowd present, and it amazed me how people just don't seem to care if they flat out run you over or your kid/stroller. Kelly was knocked into by some woman while she was holding Addison, and she almost fell over. Luckily, Addison had a good time and enjoyed seeing the fish and other animals.

Addison has learned to point at things she is interested in, as seen in the picture above and below.






Above is a picture of the only shark in the whole place. I was hoping for more than just one nurse shark.
Above is a picture of two white tigers that they had on display. Shortly after this picture they started to walk around the room. One of them walked by Addison(who was up against the glass), scaring her enough to make her cling to Kelly.