The weekend

The weekend didn't start out very well for us. If you read that last post you know that Lila had some kind of stomach bug this week. My stomach was upset during the day on Friday and that night while I was making dinner, it got me. Then Roman got it in the middle of the night. It was awful! I have never gotten sick so many time, so forcefully, in my life! Yesterday the "getting sick" was done but both of our stomachs were still pretty upset. Grana Nana came and took Lila for the day and Roman and I slept and tried to recover.

Sunday was much better and we took Lila to the pumpkin patch. The place that does the pumpkin patch is a christmas tree farm, so we were able to see all trees growing when we went on the hay ride. We saw some squirrels and a bunch of cows as well, all of which Lila loved. It's amazing how fast her vocabulary is growing. It seems she grasps things especially quickly if we teach her the sign along with the word. She calls all animals "dog", but I showed her the sign for cow a couple times while reading one of her books and she picked it up. They had a couple goats in a little pen at the pumpkin patch, which Lila became easily enamored with. We keep telling her "a goat" and doing the sign and pretty soon she was trying to call it "ago". Lesson learned for Mommy and Daddy, drop the article when you teach her a word. We said goat a couple times and she eventually got it.

Doctor's Appointments

Lila and I both had doctor's appointments in the last week. Mine was uneventful. Baby's hearbeat is normal, next appointment will be the ultrasound to check the babies in anatomy. That won't be until mid-November.




Lila's appt. was much more eventful. Or at least leading up to it was. Roman's out of town so last night Lila and I went to have some dinner with Grana Nana. Just as we were coming around the corner to our house after dinner, Lila threw up. This has happened a couple times before, she gets a litle carsick I think. I took her in and put her down for bed. About 8:30 I heard her crying a little bit in her crib, then she stopped, and then started again a little while later. When I went to check on her I discovered she had thrown up all over in her crib! She continued to throw-up/dry heave until almost midnight. This morning she seemed fine and ate a normal breakfast. Her 18 month checkup was at 11:30 and it's a 45 minute drive to get to the office. About half way there Lila proceeded to projectile vomit ALL OVER in the backseat! It was awful! The doctor said she seems fine, not ear infections, etc. so she must have some kind of stomach bug, or something she ate last night didn't agree with her. She ate lunch a short time ago and seems fine now as well. I guess we just need to avoid car rides. As for her stats, Lila now weighs 25.5 lbs which puts her in the 66th percentile! She has become quite the eater. He said that most babies her age are actually going down percentile-wise, but that we shouldn't worry about it as long as she's eating healthy food, and a good variety of it, which she is. She's in the 96th percentile for height though, so I guess that balances out her weight a bit. Her development is good, so outside of any sick visits, we don't need to come back until she's two.

Now for the photos/video. Okay, so I know this video is the wrong orientation. I was going to take a photo of her, but when I pressed the button I realized it was in record mode. So I just took a video. She is looking outside looking for squirrels, which is the sign you see her doing.


Cuddling on the couch with my very fashionable daughter. Gotta love stripes and giraffe together.



I guess she didn't want me to take her picture

Sand and Sunday

Lila is now the official owner of a sandbox. When I took her to Moody Gardens (the water park, see the July 3rd post if you missed that) she LOVED the sand. One of the moms in my moms' group was selling a sandbox at her moving sale so we got it for Lila. It's a smallish one with a cover so we can keep bugs and water out. As we thought, she loves it! Jenna, the neigbor, came over to play with her in it. Since it's past season we couldn't really find her any beach toys, but were were able to find a small sand castle thing at Target that at least had a shovel that she can use.

Saturday night Roman and I went to dinner for our anniversary and Lila stayed overnight at Grana Nana's. That's the first time she had been away from us overnight, but she does fine with Grana. She was up earlier than normal though (6:15am!), poor Grana!

On Sunday we had a bit of a scare. We were out running errands and when we pulled up in the driveway our front door was wide open. Roman went up to the house and peaked inside and didn't see anything strange, but just to be safe we called the police to come check out the house. They took their time getting there and we had groceries in the trunk, so we called our neighbors and asked if we could borrow their freezer for a little bit. Two officer came and went it with guns drawn--they don't mess around--and "cleared" all the rooms in the house. Luckily there was no one in the house, but better safe than sorry. The only thing we can think happened is that we didn't close the door all the way that morning when we came in from taking Lila out in her wagon and the wind blew the door open.

Below are some recent photos...


Eating lasagna. She's been picky about her food lately, but she loved the lasagna.


Yep, still loves shoes. The other week Roman went to the gym on his lunch break and when he started getting stuff out of his workout bag, he didn't have any shorts, but somehow one of Lila's little blue Converse made it in the bag. And she'd also left one of her little pink and white socks in his running shoe.


Lila got these beautiful bracelets from our friends Wally and Soha. They actually gave them to us at our baby shower, but Lila could pull them off her wrist for so long that it's only been recently that she can wear them. I should take an upclose picture so you can see them, they are darling!


Lila and Jenna in the sandbox

videos and a new phase

Lila has entered a whole new phase, it's called challenging authority. She has been having little fits about what seems like nothing, and is now very easily frustrated as well. She started screaming and crying today because I took her toothbrush away from her. You would have thought the world was coming to an end. I've been trying to pick my battles, but I want to know what happened to my previously easy-going toddler!! Hopefully this will be a short-lived phase.

On another note, she's doing a lot better when I leave her, especially at school. She still cries and attaches herself to my leg, but once I leave she only cries a couple minutes. Mrs. Diane, the teacher, says Lila's been having a merry old time, and she's been teaching Lila how to swing on the big-kid swing when they play outside.

I included a couple photos, and two videos. As you can see from the first video, we now have a new housekeeper. She's loves that swiffer. She did the kitchen and the bathroom floors! The second video is mostly of the back of her head, but she was looking out the window jabbering away. She just kept talking and talking so it's more about what you hear than what you see in that one I guess. She's been talking a lot lately, some of it jibberish, some of it words. When we were in San Antonio she said her first official sentence. She said "bub-bye Nana" and then "bub-bye Mer Mer".

One last thing, life for most of us here has returned to normal since hurricane Ike, but there are a lot of people who are still suffering...no power, no car, no home, no nothing. If you all could say a prayer for the people here who are still going through a tough time I know it would be appreciated.

Auntie Nikki got me this cute dress!

Lila and San Antonio

The day before Ike trashed everything.


This is the house we stayed in in San Antonio. As you can see, we weren't suffering!


We put Lila's little dog "Puppy" on Manolo's leash and she was walking him around the house.


She wanted to go walk Puppy outside.


The Alamo. Pictures aren't allowed anywhere inside, so I could only take them of the grounds.


Lila and Nana


This oak tree was huge, and that's an old water well in front of it.


Across from The Alamo is The San Antonio River Walk. We walked down to get a bite to eat.

Lila was SO enamored by the flags that were blowing outside at The Alamo. I got a video of her jabbering away and doing some kind of flag dance.

Storm damage

Here are a couple photos I took of the some of the storm damage in our neighborhood. It looked at lot worse when I was walking around, but we really didn't have it bad compared to some places.

A lot of people, my mom and Kent included, still don't have power and they are saying many people won't get power back until the end of next week. There was some extensive damage to some of the powerlines and there were quite a few power lines down in the roads, even up here where we live. We are actually lucky to have power at our house as the power company says that our zip code won't have power restored until sometime AFTER next Thr. Most of the houses in the neighborhood directly behind our house still don't have power.

I have some misc. photos of Lila and or stay in San Antonio. I'll put those in another post so as not to make this one too long.


Our holly tree; we were able to save it though



Our neigbors on the corner lost a big tree







Notice the sidewalk

Going out of our neighborhood this whole section of brick fence is gone

We're in San Antonio

Well, we survived hurricane Ike! Our neighborhood was a big mess, lots of trees down, a couple of them hit houses, but all in all we did okay. I took a bunch of photos of our area, but forgot to bring the cord to hook the camera up to download them onto the computer. Many of the areas southeast of us were not so lucky. I'm sure you all have seen pictures online or on the news. A big Chase building downtown lost half of it's windows so they're saying there's paper and computer equipment all over downtown. They estimated abut 40% of the residence in Galveston (the city on the coast where the hurricane hit) decided not to evacuate, which is VERY scary! And most of the areas of Houston and the surrounding are without power.

The power went out early in the a.m. Saturday morning and is still out. It was already so hot in our house without AC that we decided to leave yesterday afternoon. The utililty company is saying it may take upwards of two weeks to get all the power back on. My step-dad's brother and his wife recently bought a big house in San Antonio, which is about 2.5 hours from Houston, and they offered to let us all come and stay. Even doggie Manolo! So we figured rather than suffer in the heat, eating peanut butter and banana sandwiches and canned tuna, it would be better to take the drive and stay here where there's AC and internet!

As we were driving west out of Houston we passed convoy after convoy of vehicles going into Houston to help. There were tons of military vehicles, semis with food and supplies, and other vehicles with generators and equipment to help return the power. We also passed at least 50 empty tour-style buses. I imagine they were going to take people who lost their homes or who wouldn't get power back, to other cities. We had to throw away everything that was in our refrigerator and freezer so it wouldn't rot, and so will everyone else who is still without power.

Once we get our power back and we get back home I'll upload the photos I took. Until then Roman's going to try to do some work and Lila and I will relax. San Antonio has a lot of great things to do as well so hopefully we can have some fun while we are here. Here's a link to some photos from the Houston Chronicle. Thanks to all of you who were thinking about and praying for all of us here!

http://www.chron.com/news/photogallery/Ike_blasts_Houston_Galveston.html