First Birthday

On Sunday our baby turned one. He had his first taste of cake, which he thoroughly enjoyed. The big kids went around the house and found old toys, wrapped them up, and gave them to Alex for his presents. They were a lot more excited about the presents then he was, but he enjoyed the attention. I can't believe it's been a whole year! What did we ever do without him?

A Week Late

Well, you'll never guess what happened. We were having a little dinner party at our house for some friends who are moving. One of the guys had been out in our front yard talking on his cell phone. He came in and said, "I was talking on the phone, and I heard this loud noise. I turned around and looked up, and this huge branch just fell off your tree." I was thinking branch - as in the small branch that came down when we had the tornado a week ago. So we all got up and went outside to see. It was no branch. It was a huge limb....well, you can see for yourself in the first picture, it's almost as big as our neighbors little tree.

It fell into our neighbors yard, and we're just lucky it didn't do any damage. I'm guessing that it was weakened during the storm, and today it finally gave up the ghost. All the kids thought it was the greatest thing ever, and played on it for the next 20 minutes (nobody poked their eye out), while all the adults stood around and talked about it. Hey, we get our excitement where we can folks.

And Joe, being the wonderfully obsessive compulsive person that he is, is outside right now sawing it into peices, even though it is 10:30 p.m. and it is too dark to see what he is doing. That is why I'm blogging about it this late. But I'd better go check to see if he's poked his eye out.

Children's Festival

Every year our base has a Children's Festival in April, and everything is Free (one of my favorite words)! They have face painting, arts and crafts,

games, food, plus children's ID finger printing, booths on nutrition and safety, and a whole lot of other stuff. The kids always love going to this,

and they come away with a lot of loot. It's nice to be able to live vicariously through your kids - if they're having a good time, then so are we.

Our city actually puts on a Free Children's Festival every year in April too (are they competing with the base - I don't know), but they always have

theirs on a Sunday, so we never go to that one. I think that Joe thinks that one festival a year is enough though. He can only handle so much fun.

Tornado

Having grown up in a state where you don't normally have to worry about tornadoes, it's weird to have to worry about them now. Every spring here we know to expect these huge storms with lightening, flash flooding, strong winds, hail, and yes, tornadoes. Our kids do tornado drills in school, as opposed to the earthquake drills I did as a kid. So, at midnight last night the tornado sirens went off. We woke up all our kids, brought them into our bedroom, and sat in the closet for 20-30 minutes while we watched the news on the TV through the door. We got about 70 mph winds, hail, and they said that a funnel cloud was spotted over the college that is about 3 blocks away from us. I haven't heard anything about where the tornado actually touched down, or if it was even within our city limits. Last time we had a tornado it touched down just south of the base, and Joe was at work at the time, so it kind of scared me. There was some damage, including downed power lines, broken signs, shingles blown off roofs, some windows shattered, broken branches everywhere, one uprooted tree, and some cars and a tractor trailer that were flipped over. We just had one medium sized branch broken off in our front yard, and a lot of debris on our street, but that was it. I know that as the storm has moved North East over night and through this morning it has increased in intensity, so we were really lucky.

What a mess!

Workers out early, cleaning up the mess

Our neighbors across the street

Our other neighbors across the street

I don't envy these people - see their van?

A Garden?

We've been in our house for just under 4 years now, and every year I swear up and down that we are going to have a garden. Of course, it never happens. I just never have enough motivation (or money) to commit to the whole process of clearing out an area of our yard, tilling, killing off the grass roots, worrying about digging around the sprinkler system, etc. I think I would have had more motivation if I knew that we were going to stay in this house forever, but we're moving in two years, and not everyone wants a garden. Anyway, this year I'm going half-way, and I've done "container gardening". That's just a fancy way of saying I planted some seeds in a bunch of cheap flowerpots. My kids are excited about this, and want to help me water them every day. I'm just afraid that nothing will grow, or if it does I'm going to kill everything and waste the $10 I spent. But time will tell, and hey, at least I did it Now I can't get that song out of my head, "the prophet said to plant a garden, so that's what I'll do. . ."

River Walk

For Spring Break we spent a couple of days in San Antonio with some good friends. We were able to go to the temple, and then we just hung out. The weather was perfect, so we walked around a lot and we went down to the River Walk to have lunch. If you've never been there, the San Antonio River Walk is a shallow river, with parallel sidewalks on each side, lined with shops and restaurants, and it's all one story below street level, right downtown. It's a huge tourist spot, so it's always crowded, but a lot of fun. We love going to San Antonio whenever we can because there's so much to do there. We can't wait until the next trip.

Airshow

I finally broke down and decided to do a blog for our family, so here goes. Our base put on an airshow at the airport, and the famous Air Force Thunderbirds came. They haven't been to our base since the mid 80's, so it was a big deal for the town. We didn't want to be there all day with four small kids, so we hit the tail end of it, when we knew we'd see the Thunderbirds. We passed literally thousands of cars on our way to the airport, all parked on the side of the road, in fields, in parks, around the lake, in business parking lots, even at the KOA camp, and anywhere they could find a place. There was also about a mile long line of cars (in the left turning lane) trying to get into the airport. We passed all the parked cars, and all the cars waiting in line, and we kept driving towards the airport. I don't know where we thought we were going, but we just kept driving. Wouldn't you know it, we found an empty spot to park that was right across the street from the exact spot on the runway where the Thunderbirds took off from. It was perfect! Incredibly loud, but perfect. I think JT was the most excited of the kids because for Christmas he got a set of military model planes, including an F-16, so he was excited to see his planes. It was a lot of fun.