Holidays are Officially Underway

Since it has been a while since our last post-Ike blog post, a lot has happened.  This post is to provide some history and pics from late September, October, and November.

Autumn Kids

The kids seem to love the fall.  It is great when the temperature starts to taper off here in the Houston area because the summer can be pretty brutal.  Jackson and Emily love wearing their long pants, coats...

   

...and especially those days when it gets cold enough for the hat and mittens!

 

And of course, fall can not arrive without conjuring up memories of that holiday line-up.  First comes Halloween and all of the fun costumes.  This year, Jackson was Spiderman (no surprise there) and Emily picked Minnie over Ariel in a game-time decision while costume shopping.  They got to wear costumes and have Halloween fun many, many times this year from the fall festival at their school...

   

... to the pumpkin patch

    

    

... and lots of other random times in between.  In fact, Emily threw her Minne outfit on just today as we were getting the Christmas decorations out! 

Finally, the big day of Halloween arrived.  We had a fun party with all of our neighbors out in "Legacy Square" before trick-or-treating to get lots of yummy candy.

   

   

Friends and Family

Moving into November, we also had a visit from the Broach Family, as well as getting to see them again at Harrison's 1st BDay party.

And a trip to the Texas Renaissance Festival

    

    

Home Improvements

As we have continued to settle in at the new pad, we have made a few more design adjustments to make it home.  Angel painted a sweet Spidey above Jackon's bed to match the bedding.  The guest room was spruced up with some Uppercase Living wall word-art.  Angel also did some creative painting in Emily's room.

 

Thanksgiving

Next in the holiday lineup is that pound-packing extravaganza we all love: Thanksgiving.  This year was a relaxing extended weekend at home with Nana and Grandpa Orren.  While we didn't skimp on the feast, teamwork made it seem like no big deal to prepare (it also helped that we got a prepared turken from Boudreaux's).

  

  

   

Christmas Tree Hunting

While Angel was the only shopaholic hardcore enough to do the early morning thing (1:30am!!!), the whole crew mobilized on Friday to journey to the Mill Hollow Christmas Tree Farm to pick our arboreal beauty.  The drive was a heck of a lot further than I had planned due to some misinformation from Google maps, but the troops hung in there and the journey was worth it as we found the perfect tree for our first live one.

   

   

  

Intact After the Storm

We made it through the storm with no damage to the house.  Our fence looks a bit exhausted from the hours of menacing wind, but we should be able to get it back upright without too much effort.  Our neighborhood park had a couple of trees uprooted (small ones) and all of the road signs were down in the street or the nearby grass. 

I was able to get a glimpse of some of the most ferocious winds at about 4:00am.  Make no mistake, Ike was certainly a force to be reckoned with.  Opening the door had a similar to effect to that of rolling down your car window while driving 80 miles per hour as the pressure difference between the house and outdoors tried to equalize.  Standing in the safety of our brick-enclosed entryway (see picture below), I was amazed that our pine tree hadn't snapped yet.  The wind was pummeling the poor conifer holding it at a constant 60 degree angle while the individual branches flailed wildly in an attempt to regain purchase in the soil.  With each gust, I was certain the tree could bear no more and would snap at the trunk.  To my surprise, that tree as well as most others in the neighborhood made it through the night.  I guess Highland Homes plants 'em in pretty good :)

All things considered, we feel very lucky and hope that everyone else in the Houston/Galveston area was able to stay safe through the mayhem.  There is a big thunderstorm today that is hampering the rescue/cleanup efforts so it is still difficult to say how widespread the damage is, but it certainly looks like Ike was pretty rough on Houston.

Casa de Bateman against a pre-Ike sunset:

Dad is Crazy

http://yewtaah.blogspot.com/2008/09/making-lemonade.html

Batten down the hatches

So it is a few hours before we expect to start to see some nasty winds.  Today I challenge the notion that no good can come from a hurricane.  We just got both of our cars in the garage for the first time since we moved in :)  All of the not-sure-where-it-goes junk has been collecting dust in our garage.  Right now I am quite satisfied with the accomplishment of getting all of that stuff organized and the cars parked in the garage.  It doesn't take much to keep me happy I guess...

We'll continue to make small checkpoint posts as long as we have power

Ike is on the way

Seems like it has been a busy hurricane season.  We have been spared from the other names storms this season, but I think Ike is dropping by for a visit this weekend.  We'll be staying in town to stick it out since our area is not prone to flooding.  The winds may hurl some foreign objects through our windows, but we plan to be in the safety of the windowless media room.  The brick wall should provide protection against any flying debris.  Most likely we'll lose power, but other than that we hope it won't be too bad.  Cross your fingers for us!

As you can see by this latest forecast, Ike should be directly over us by about 7am on Saturday.  Projections indicate that it will still be hurricane force winds of 115 mph even though we are about 75 miles inland.

Tramonte Nearing Completion

We have been in our new house for over a month now, and we're still not done "moving in".  Now I'm not quite sure what the generally accepted standard is for time to get your house situated, but we have got to be behind schedule at best.  Part of this we can blame on paying extreme attention to detail, part can be blamed on continued entertainment for a 2 & 4 year old, and part of it can certainly be blamed on good ol' procrastination.  In any event, we are very pleased with the parts of the house that are now finalized with paint, furniture, and those other personal touches that make a house a home.

I will have to give special props to Angel's design ability.  I think we have the next candidate for Design Star on our hands.  Everything that she dreams up seems to come to fruition in an awesome room that receives numerous compliments from our guests.  Now, in the last house we had the built-in.  I like to think that it was my handiwork that made it awesome, but the workmanship was pretty shoddy even if it did take me 2 months to finish.  Making function out of an empty space was the real magic. 

This special skill is certainly apparent in Angel's latest creation in our new abode.  Our game room upstairs has lots of space, which is perfect since we have lots of kiddie stuff in the way of toys, crafts, games, books, etc.  The functional needs of this room really began to hit me as I have watched Jackson and Emily trying to post colorings of Spiderman up on the walls with scotch tape (clearly Angel knows a thing or two about kids :) )

What you see in the picture above is a black portion of the wall that has been made into a chalkboard.  It gets even better as the magnetic primer allows the kids to put magnets directly on the black area.  A friend at work pointed out that the challenge now will be making sure that the boundary is clearly understood by our aspiring artists.  "No, don't draw on mommy & daddy's bedroom walls!"

The organization bins provide for an orderly configuration of everything from coloring books to fake food.  I think Angel used the dewey decimal system combined with her own color coding scheme to get the rules in place.  The 4 foot hardwood strip provides a nice place to stand an easel, put together a puzzle, or lay down a race track.  Finally, the sheet metal strip provides an additional space to post up the kids' work for all to see.

Right next to the play room you'll find my favorite spot in the house: the media room.  I like to use the term media room since home theatre leans too heavily on the movie function of the room.  Currently, the HD projector has logged more hours displaying Spiderman taking down bad guys on the Wii than it has showing movies.  We did get to watch some of Michael Phelps awesome heats in the newly configured retreat. 

Wrapping up my thoughts quickly, here is a shot of the kids playing on the built in desks (won't be whitewashed like that for long :) ) and the front of the house. 

Well, that is it for this post.  Going to get the kids to bed...