Quick Update

Thank you all again for your thoughts and prayers during this time.

We were grateful to have an electrician fix all of our electrical damage on Wednesday. So now all of our power is in working order and we have hot water again!

We still have a crew of guys here everyday tending to the tree demolition and clean up. They are making great progress, hopefully they will be finished soon.

We still need to have the phone company come out to reattach our box and lines, but thankfully they all work, they are just hanging from the house and in the yard.

To answer a question many of you have had, no, our home insurance company is not covering this damage. They cover damage done to the home, not the trees. If the home had been damaged by the trees, then they would cover that, but we are responsible for everything in the yard. I have been working very hard at the Outback to try to pay for all this damage and we have had to juggle other funds and savings around to make ends meet and pay the workers. However, once again we are grateful that the damage was not any worse than it was and that we are all safe.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Ice Storm

Many of you have been concerned for us during our recent ice storm. Thank you for your prayers and concerns. We are all safe, and for now, we still have heat and some electricity. The phone company got our LAN lines up and running today, so I thought I would send you all pictures and updates on our latest natural disaster.

Sunday evening it began sleeting heavily here in OK and continued through the night. We did not sleep well because of all the noise of crashing trees. The trees here were so frozen and heavy laden with ice that they were snapping and splitting. When we woke up Monday morning, the entire outdoor world had been transformed to an ice sculpture. Some of it was quite beautiful:

The front of our house glistening with silvery icicles...

The tree limbs preserved in ice.....

However, with the beauty comes great devastation:

Here are our Bradford pear trees blooming in the spring time.

Here is the Outback Steakhouse's signature appetizer, the Bloomin' Onion.


Here are the Bradford pear trees Monday morning....note the similarity to the Bloomin' Onion...

We are grateful that none of the limbs hit our vehicles or the house itself. There are several people around town who cannot say the same. Our greatest damage was this tree in the back yard.

It snapped...

Landed on the power line...

And ripped the electrical box from the house.

We are currently awaiting an electrician to come out and reattach the box. It caused our major, 220 appliances to stop working, the back wall of the kitchen's wiring is messed up, the upstairs bathrooms have partial power and the worse part is that our hot water heater is not working. Thankfully, we have some good friends nearby who have been letting us bathe and shower at their house.

We are needing to have 5 trees removed completely due to the amount of damage they suffered. Thankfully, we have had a crew out here the past two days working on that. Also, because of the major damage all around town, the city is sending out trucks to haul off the debris, so we don't have to pay for hauling. We are also thankful that we did not suffer as much damage as others in our small town. There are several people who still do not have any electricity, many have moved into hotels during this time.

We are expecting it to snow about 6 inches tonight which will slow done the repairs around here, so it may be awhile before we have hot water again and for all of our electricity to work.

I will continue to update as things occur. For now, we are back online and our phones are in working order, so call or e-mail if you like!

We are Elves!

Check this out!

http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=9616519998

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MADELINE!!!

Madeline turned 7 last Friday, November 2nd. Here are some pictures of that day and her "Little Mermaid" party.

The Birthday girl dressed up as "the Little Mermaid with fins".
(This was a present from Grammie and Grandpa Judisch!)

Here is Evelyn dressed up as "the Little Mermaid with legs".
She is modeling the face painting that we did for all the girls at the party.
Neal did the mermaid, and I did the "Flounder"...yes I know his is better!

We had a fish pinata.
Note: Evelyn is now "Cinderella"...she has multiple princess personalities
(FYI: It takes four little girls a while to break one of these!)

Birthday Girl blowing out her candle.
Madeline has a thing for "birthday hats"...You MUST wear one if it is your birthday and you MUST wear it as you are blowing out your candles...

Present time!

On Halloween night we took the kids to a Fall Festival at a local mega-non-denominational-very rich church called Journey Church. They have over 4000 members! This place is HUGE! All night long from 5pm to 9pm they had Papa John's pizza, sodas, and cookies. They had 5 different inflatables all indoors-3 moon bounces, 1 obstacle course, and 1 giant slide. They had games, face painting, nail painting, candy, etc. Outdoors, there was a hay ride, a petting zoo and pony rides! Everything was absolutely free! Here are a few pictures:

Here is "The Little Mermaid with Legs", "Aurora" AKA "Sleeping Beauty",
and "Mr. Incredible" (that is as "dressed-up" as Aidan gets!)

Sliding down the moon bounce...

My camera died after these pictures, but the kids had a BLAST!

The Cornfield Maze

Last weekend we went to the cornfield maze in Shawnee (about 45 min. NE from Norman). We went with our friends Scott and Michelle Grawe and their children Lydia (6), Caleb(4), Julia(2), and Alyssa(5 mos.). We had a great time together and then went out for pizza afterwards!
Here are some pictures:

Our Friends

Petting and feeding the farm animals

Inside the Maze

On top of the hay. As you can see, we had beautiful weather.

Riding in the barrell cars

Picking the "perfect" pumpkin. She has named it "Pumpy"!

If I were one of the seven dwarfs...

I had forgotten just how tiring early pregnancy can be. I remembered that I was very tired with the other kiddos, but I don't remember being THIS tired. Of course, I am waiting tables 4 nights a week, I have 3 other kids to care for and I am just a tiny bit older - ahem...Anyway, I was doing a phonics lesson with Madeline earlier. She is at the point in her reading where we go over a new rule for the day, then she reads her word list and her daily story. In the middle of the story, I feel a nudge as Madeline says, "Mom, you are listening with your eyes closed again." OOPS!

Normanites are CRAZY!

So, while everyone is off from work and school today, we Okies here in Norman are not...why, one might ask?...It is Columbus Day and all... Ya, but on Saturday OU played TEXAS, so schools and various places of employment closed on Friday so everyone could get ready for the "BIG GAME"! They are really nuts around here. Neal had forgotten that the game was Saturday, so last Wednesday he began assigning the reading for one of his classes on Friday. Several students immediately raised their hands, panic on their faces, reminding him that the university was going to be closed and hoping desperately that he was not going to make them be there. A graduate teaching assistant was telling me the other day that she had assigned a paper due that day and her students refused to do it. Can you imagine? Telling your college professor or teacher "no" to their assignments because of a football game?! And what is even crazier is that the dean of the university would back them up!
All year long you can find "BEAT TEXAS" paraphernalia anywhere around here. People wear hats, t-shirts, bumper stickers, etc. all year long, just for one game! It is pretty pathetic too because it is such a one-sided rivalry. For UT, OU is just another team to beat. You will not find any "BEAT OU" paraphernalia anywhere in Austin.
This is quite indicative of the overall attitude that Okies have about Texans. Okies don't like Texans. They make fun of us, our sports teams, and anything they can think of. They claim that Texans are stuck up and proud. I think it is sad really. We Texans are proud. We are proud of being Texan. But, I have learned that other people, especially those in Oklahoma, are not proud of where they are from, so they have to put down those who are.
Oh well...
This year, the OU Sooners beat the Longhorns. Neal and I are some of the very few people disappointed by this, but at least the attitude around here is good. People are happy and they are happy to go to work and school on a holiday because their college football team won.