4 weeks to go...

Grandma Visits!!

My grandma and mom came to visit over the weekend. It was really good to see them and Easton enjoyed having both grandmas to play with. By the time they left he was getting good with saying grandma and grandma-great to get their attention!

"No Power"

Sunday afternoon the remnants of Hurricane Ike blew through Cincinnati. We had a windstorm for about 3 hours with gusts up to 60 mph. It did enough damage to the city that we were left with no electricity until Tuesday evening around 10pm. We were able to keep our food semi-cold with ice and our neighbors hooking our refrigerator up to their generator for a few hours each day. We used our grill to cook with and even heated Easton some ravioli up using the pan to Riley's boy scout mess kit! In the evenings we watched "The Office" on DVD with the laptop.

Easton pretty much took the blackout instride, but he did like to have his own flashlight and wouldn't drink milk the whole time because he only likes it warmed up in the microwave. He was also pretty bummed that he could not watch cartoons in the morning. (Which he usually likes to do while drinking his milk after he wakes up each day.) By the second morning he just said, "Cartoons? Nooo .. no power."

It is hard to see because we didn't use the flash on our camera, but this is Easton standing in front of the candles that was used for light in the morning and evenings.

Hurricane Ike Comes to Ohio

Monday morning after the storm Easton and I took a walk in our neighborhood to see what kind of damage was done. These are a few of our neighbor's trees!

I took this picture after they had been working on sawing off the branches, since the top of the tree was in the road. I was pretty impressed that it came out of the ground by the roots.

This street was closed for two days until they got this tree out of the road. If you look close you can see that it is being held up by power lines.

And finally... our tree. We were feeling really blessed that it stayed upright throughout the storm. We only had a few dead branches fall off and land in the yard and there was no damage to our house!