Hurricane Ike: Friday Night into Saturday Morning

1:30 am Saturday-We were awoken by load winds and the power going out around 1:30 am. I heard the monitor turn off and then I saw my cell phone flashing with some text messages. I had a few friends asking me if our power was out as well. The winds were so strong and J and I both could not believe Jace was still asleep. I kept going in to check on him because he is such a light sleeper and the storm was so loud. We grabbed our radio and flashlights to go into the living room. We listened to the storm and the radio until about 4:00 am then tried to go back to bed. Around 7:00 am we got up again to see the damage. The wind was still blowing pretty hard and the rain was still coming down. Jace was still asleep.

8:00 am- Jace woke up and walked from window to window assessing the damage.
He was very interested in the radio.

9:15 am- This is what the sky looked like all morning. It was very gloomy.
We were wrong, our crape myrtles withstood the powerful gusts. We didn't have one break off those trees. Our neighbors banana trees did end up blowing over and breaking. It was so weird to be able to see so far in that direction because usually they blocked our view. When I looked over their fence I could also see their entire pool awning had blown off into their swimming pool. Yikes! I had another lady friend in my ward have an entire huge tree fall into her pool.
10:25 am- Daddy let Jace eat some cookies after breakfast because of the special occasion. We had borrowed a generator from our brother-in- law who is working up in Humble, TX. They had an extra we could borrow so J drove up Friday afternoon to get it "just in case". We were glad we had it. We plugged it in and here Jace is watching the news about the storm. I was glued to the tv everytime we turned it on. I love reading all types of statistics about what was going on around Houston. CenterPoint Energy (they service most of Houston) has 2.2 million customers and after the storm 2.1 million had no power. It was crazy. I just thought this picture was too funny not to include. I must have caught both of them mid-chewing. Hilarious.

Annie didn't sleep all night. She wandered around the house, sat at the bottom of our bed, and tossed and turned like we did. Poor little thing.