Laurel Elisabeth Stevens

DSC_0089 , originally uploaded by j_lstevens . This is Elisabeth at her Flower Girl Birthday Party. Click on the "post" info to see more photos on flickr.

I'm just cleaning up from Elisabeth's party--her 5th birthday. Actually her big day is tomorrow, but she has obligations (already! piano and ballet) so today was her party with friends. She's been saying for nearly 6 months that she's going to have a flower girl birthday party. How does one think of these things? She will be a flower girl in a few weeks in my cousin's wedding. So then I had to figure out how to have a flower girl party. Thanks to my John's mom and some good friends, we pulled it off. I told Elisabeth I had 2 favorite parts (yes, my favorites come first). The preparation and anticipation was delightful. A few weeks ago we did some shopping (before the hurricane!) and then Elisabeth picked out games to play (not flower girl related). Today she was hanging streamers and putting pieces of streamers in chairs. She put a little candy dish on an end table and said, "It's just like Grandma Virginia's!" She had gotten some very special ...

The power returned at about 10:00PM Tuesday night. Lights turned on all over the house and hoots and hollers could be heard from across the neighborhood. We checked the news, updated our facebook sites and went back to bed. Because we had pretty much cleaned out our refrigerator we figured it was a good time to really get it cleaned. I checked the sprinkler system - it is functional (much to my relief) but we won't need it for awhile given all the rain that we have received. So through it all Elisabeth is still dancing - only now she has music from the stereo rather than just in her head. Laurel called the last few days our Hurrication but now that the power is back on we are into Hurriclean mode.

Our backyard after the storm had passed (around Sat. lunch time). You can see the one tree that we will loose; it is resting on a nearby oak tree and poised over our neighbor's house. We knew that it survivied much of the storm in that position (I first saw it at about 5AM) so hopefully it is stable. The tree guys will take care of it next week. Other than that our only damage is a window shade that was stained by a leak through the window. We were soon to learn that we made out pretty well. We soon found ourselves catching up the neighbors to see how everyone fared. Many homes had trees on top of them (see above) or across their yard (this one has already been cleared from the driveway). This particular house had two trees resting on it. It will be a few days before they will be cleared. Yes, we were fortunate. To add insult to injury the night after Ike there was a large thunderstorm that brought more water into these damaged homes. Another picture of our backyard after cleanup...

We were all up at 5 in the morning with Hurricane Ike still roaring outside. We still had power (until 6:20AM) so we got some coffee made and had a warm breakfast knowing that soon power would likely be out. You can see some of our hurricane preparations in this photo: all the china is down from the hutch and the furniture is moved toward the center of the room. We also took down any hanging pictures, made lots of ice, filled every container we could find with water, and protected any electronics we cared about. The eye of the storm came by our house at around 7AM Saturday morning. THe winds on either side of the eye were Hurricane 1 force being that we were only about 10 miles from the eye of Hurricane Ike. After the storm is just rained for hours. To pass the time we danced in the dining room that Saturday morning.