Crazy Moms and Routine

I have been a creature of routine for as long as I can remember. Diverging from that routine sends me into a rather quick tail spin and those that suffer most unfortunately are those around me the most, my hubby and kids. It's not like I don't know this is how I function but yet allowing some flexibility isn't a strong suit of mine. My kids have only been in school for 10 day, hear that 10 days this year so far; and it took almost everything I had to get through last summer. Don't get me wrong, I love my children, but they too like routine and when they don't have it they pick fights, lots of fights and they go from room to room in our home creating minor mess after minor mess that due to my compulsive cleaning only I can seem to clean properly enough.

I was beginning to feel really guilty until I went to church last Sunday and was able to commiserate with two other moms who had battled evacuation and hurrication as single parents like me. One asked me, did they fight along the way? Mine were fighting so much that at one point I heard skin to skin contact and several loud thuds, she said. Thank God, I thought to myself, I was not alone in that journey. She said, I had to pull the car over at one point and just scream. Again, thank God, I was not alone in that journey either. Except I pulled over twice, so rapidly and so quickly that everything that was piled in two seats, just slumped to the floor. I was thankful that my rather new tires held up well during the rapid halt of movement. As I was pulling over quickly and screaming at the top of my lungs, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rear mirror and just about died. Really, really is that an image I want ingrained in my children's minds? I think not, but I had to quickly ask, "Do you like seeing me like this?" No, was their immediate response but that begged the question, "then why do you keep acting like this, when I'm driving in this car alone for several hours on a busy two lane highway?" "We don't know", was said in unison.

It will never cease to amaze me how much 4 children can argue and pick at each other. Wouldn't life be so much simpler if EVERYONE JUST CHOSE TO BE NICE AND GET ALONG?! This is my daily prayer now, that my children will learn to extend grace and compassion towards each other. We're using those words a lot now. Please God let them sink in!

When I was in Rockwall, we went to a mega church up the road from my parents house. It's a fabulous church, love the music but I could not worship there regularly. It's just too large for me. But the service that day was so great! The pastor was teaching on prayer and how families today just don't pray together enough, so he challenged everyone in the congregation to be families that would commit to a 7-5-2 calendar. Praying for your family 7 days a week, praying with your family 5 days a week and praying with your spouse 2 days a week.

We took the challenge! Can't say that our calendar is a total 7-5-2 yet but we're attempting to get there and look forward to seeing what will happen when we do. I'm hoping that my title "Crazy Mom" will begin to dissipate a little bit and I will be able to see characteristic changes in my children that make our home more harmonious. Miracles do happen right? Absolutely!

Good to be Home

The kids and I got home last night around 5. Driving into town was surreal. Seeing is definitely believing. Spending many years in Kansas as a child, I don't think I totally understood how much damage a tornado could do until I saw a town after it'd been hit by one. Similarly, seeing our town after it had been hit by one of the largest hurricanes, although only a cat 2, and the destruction it left here just makes you sad. So many lives have been affected. We have several church members whose homes have been badly damaged and I know of two people, one I work closely with whose home was totally destroyed, including most things in it.

As Ella and I went to HEB this afternoon to pick up some groceries, we took a different route out of our neighborhood and saw that nearly every single fence had been blown down, just snapped at the posts. Ella said, "Momma, do you know why our house was not hurt?" I asked why, and she said, "Before we went to Mimi's I was praying in my room and God got my message, so our house wasn't hurt much at all."

We do have a lot to be thankful for; a home with very little damage, power that returned surprisingly pretty quickly, and loving families that helped us out in so many ways this past week. We are so thankful for all of those things and will continue to pray and do what we can to help others less fortunate. This morning we started the day at church with an informal praise and worship time. Then Mark Thomas, Ella and I helped to rake up all the debris from the day school playground along with several other church members. Max went with another church member to saw into chunks some larger trees that had fallen at a woman's house and help to carry them to the curb. Don't worry he wasn't the one using the chain saw. And Mark took Ben and helped clear debris from another man's home.

Tomorrow we're having our two services outside, mostly just to be a presence for the community as they drive past our corner and also to combat the fact that the church still does not have power. We'll be praising God for sure.

The kids will have next week off from school. That makes a total of two weeks for this hurrication. Would you believe that they've only been in school for 10 days so far this year? They're hardly complaining but I'm definitely ready for them and us to get back into our normal routine.

When being tall isn't a good thing

Mark went home today and arrived without any problem. We still do not have power and may not for several days. We've been told by several people that our area tends to be last for some reason.

I also heard today that only 4 schools in the city have power and 2 completely lost their roofs. So the board will meet next week to make decisions about when to restart.

Mark went up into the attic in the main house to relight the pilot and due to his lovely height he hit his head on a rafter, lost his balance and stuck his leg through the dining room ceiling. He called me to say that he had made a rather large boo-boo. Learning from lessons in the past, when he told me what he'd done, I knew to ask about him first and check to make sure he was ok before I asked too many questions about my dining room. I just said, "well, I've been wanting to redo that room anyway, so now I have to."

Positive Signs

We've heard today that two of our main roads that are very close to our house have power today. Our neighborhood still does not but we're hopeful that maybe within the next few days we'll be up and running. Mark is going home tomorrow. Always the minister, he can't stand to be sitting here doing nothing and wants to get back to help others out. So we've borrowed a generator, thanks Jacksons and he'll be back on the home front tomorrow. Still no school so our hurrication continues.

A Family Again

Mark is here! He arrived last night around 9:30. He hasn't made the trip to Rockwall as often as I have lately so he missed a few roads and had to wind around in the dark so he was very relieved to pull into the driveway. All the kids were so excited to see him and Shiloh went nuts when she saw the kids! I think she thought she'd died and gone to heaven in my parents back yard. This morning she was still acting crazy and Mark said, "you know what they say about people who drink salt water?" My parents have a salt water pool and Shiloh thinks it's just one big bowl of water for her. Hopefully she figures out real quickly that it's not really for her!

We're going up to the school in an hour or two just to check out the process of enrollment. The kids are now expressing some concern and I can't say that I blame them. It's hard to think about starting over in a place where you obviously know you won't be staying. But we got the phone call last night that our schools were "closed indefinitely" so until we know about our power it appears as if we'll be here awhile.

I found out yesterday that our power grid is supplied from a substation in Bridge City, which was flooded heavily by over 4 feet of salt water which does tremendous damage. So we've been told it could be 4-6 weeks before we get power back. I hope that's a very generous estimate so that we're all surprised when it comes back on much quicker than that.

Mark will be traveling back home later this week. He is supposed to preach on Sunday and he also feels very called to helping people in our area who received more damage to their homes than we did. I will be calling the insurance agency sometime today or tomorrow to file a claim on our car port. Mark said that he feels pretty confident the whole structure will have to come down in order to be repaired.

It was very strange for him last night watching the nightly news. He has not seen any coverage of the storm since it happened so he was just shocked by the damage in Galveston and parts of the coast that we have become so familiar with in the last year. He obviously knew our town looked rough but seeing the area where the eye went through just blows your mind.

Mark is on his way

Mark is on his way North as I type. In all his preparations to get the house and church ready, he forgot to fill the van up so he's hoping to encounter a station quickly. I've seen on the news that wait times are 2-3 hours for gas and they're only allowing you to get 10 gallons at a time. Hopefully once he gets North enough he'll be able to fill up. Living down in the land of refineries you quickly get a sense of how important those facilities and jobs are, not just to our community but to the entire United States. The refineries less than 30 minutes from us process several million gallons of crude oil daily.

I'm very thankful that he's on his way. It's been very stressful dealing with the kids and two evacuations in less than three weeks and now just knowing that you can't go back to your house. It's hard. We're hopeful that we'll know more as the days progress and that we can all be back in Beaumont soon, slipping back into our routines. The boys were just starting baseball season and Ella was looking forward to starting gymnastics.

Damage Assessment

Local officials continue to do damage assessment within our town and as of right now the info is not that promising. Entergy, our power supplier, says that 99% of Texans in southeast Texas are without power and 119 out of 187 transmission lines are out with two entire plants off line, so they do not estimate that we'll have power for weeks. The sewer lines have been comprised so you can guess what that means. And several of our local schools sustained a lot of damage too.

Mark still has cell service, our home line is out. He and I continue to be in contact and he more than likely will head our way today, if he can get out. He spent so much time preparing our house and helping some of our church members that he's concerned about how much gas he has in his tank now, and there are no gas stations open. Also the damage to some local highways is not totally known and as the storm progressed north, it did more damage through towns we usually travel through but are not shown on our local news, just national, so it's hard to know what the roads are like there.

I just tried to pull up our school board site and it's offline so I'm not sure what we'll do about school for the kids. They're obviously not begging me to find a solution but I'm nervous about the possibility of them being out school for weeks. I have all their records with me in the paperwork you should always have in place to gather if there's a storm, so I could register them here at my parents but that seems like such a headache.

Just wanted to give everyone a little update and I'll continue to do so when I have something a little more promising to post. Thank you so much for all the messages you've sent to our email and cell phones. We really appreciate the support.

Good News and Bad News

The good news is that our house was not damaged that much. We had some minor damage to our carport area with shingles and tar paper getting torn off. Thanks to my wonderful husband the rest of the house faired well. During Hurricane Dolly and a tropical storm we had about three weeks ago, the boys new room had taken on water twice. Mark surmised that it was the city water backing up under the toilet in their bathroom so he uncovered the manhole in our back yard and capped off that line, hoping to prevent another back up this time. Well, today when he went to check on the house, he spent last night at our church, he went out to pull off the cover of that manhole and the water was all the way up to the top, so had he not capped off our line the boys' room would most definitely have taken on a lot of water.

Beaumont did sustain a lot of damage. If you'd like to see some live footage and videos of our town you can go to www.kfdm.com and they have a lot of coverage. It's hard to imagine, knowing now exactly the streets they're traveling, many of them less than 2 minutes from our home. I'm very thankful that we heeded the evacuation orders and left town. Our energy provider has stated that the damage is catastrophic and worse than Rita, so we're not sure how long it will be before we get power again.

The kids and I are concerned obviously but could not be in a better place. Having my family so close is wonderful. My brother in law, that is a police officer, called me the day I got here and said, "you should go to a shelter, you'd get everything free," and I quickly said, "I'm pretty sure I'll get most things free exactly where I am." The comfort of a familiar home with cousins and sisters around is just fine by me.

Mark is determing if he'll try to head North tomorrow, since we'll be without power for a few days at least. We appreciate the prayers and will gladly take any more you'd offer up. I've missed a week of work as of right now and the kids are behind in school. Their teachers were so apologetic last week at Goal's Night, explaining that they have such rigid curriculum guidelines that they're so behind right now, and that was just with three days off for Gustav, so now with 2 more and likely this next week too, I'm sure we'll have a lot to catch up on.

But, God is good, our house is intact and my husband is safe. I'll keep this up date as much as possible during the next few days but again, if you'd like to see what's current in our town, check out www.kfdm.com.

Our Second Home

Just as expected Mark and I did make quick decisions this morning. I knew going to bed last night around midnight that the storm had again shifted North so at 6 a.m. I knew when the phone rang that it would be the school district notifying us of cancellation for today and tomorrow. So we quickly got up and started packing. The kids and I left around 8:30 a.m. and it took us 8 hours to make what is normally a 5 hour trip to Dallas. Mark has again stayed at home, making sure that all the elderly people in our church are taken care of, since the mandatory evacuation occurred so late. He said several of them were very stressed this morning as couples were separated so that the less mobile would be transported by emergency vehicles and their spouses were left to figure out how to follow or where to go for safety. He is going to finish preparing our house for the storm and will then decide if he stays and rides it out along with a few other families or heads to Dallas to join us. Although the kids are loving these "hurrications" the stress and fatigue it's taking on Mark and me both physically and financially is getting really old. Hurricane season does not officially end until November 30th but yesterday was officially the height of the season so none of this is a surprise just not enjoyable by anyone living near the shore. We'll keep you all posted. The Keffer family echos what was seen on several signs as we headed North, "Take a hike Ike!"

Here we go Again

We are well within this "cone" and yet no one is calling for evacuation. When we were clearly not going to get Gutav as a visitor we were all ordered to evacuate without question. So can someone please explain to me why this storm is barreling straight toward our coastline and we're all just sitting still? Mark and I are going to be making some quick decisions in the morning trying to figure out what we should do. School has been canceled for some of our surrounding areas but not our district yet; although the university has cancelled classes tomorrow and Friday. We ask you again to pray for our safety and those surrounding us. It's very hard to pray that the storm go somewhere else because you just don't want anyone else to be harmed or their homes to be damaged.

These are some pictures of what Mark saw when he went to Baton Rouge last week after Gustav went through. The news media continues to amaze us. All you hear about on the national news is New Orleans this and New Orleans that but there are so many other communities that have been devastated by recent hurricanes and yet you never even hear about them or their struggles.

Tattle Tale

School is always interesting with four children and to be quite honest, although I pray for our teachers every year and practically beg God to give us good ones, things don't always work out as I'd hoped.

I can pretty much count on the behaviour of all my children, both good and bad, so most things do not surprise me. Still nonetheless, I want people to see the good in my children even if on some days they have to look a little harder.

In Mark Thomas' class they come home with conduct folders each week and there are comments for each day along with a final grade for that week. Well, after the first week, I could tell this would not be a folder I looked forward to seeing each week. His teacher had written talking, talking, talking, talking for each day and yelling at recess on one specific day and given him a conduct grade of 70% for that week. Great, we're off to a good start! I signed the folder and then wrote my own comment that I would speak to him and it would be clear that there would be consequences if it didn't improve.

Now, I am not a mother that is above bribery and when I think it will work, I go full steam ahead. MT loves to go to the dollar store and knows the true value of a dollar even if he doesn't always save them up. So, my proposition, should he choose to accept it would be that temporarily until we got on track, if he were to come home with a conduct grade of 90% he'd get to buy something for $5 or less, and if he came home with a grade of 100% then we'd celebrate with something $10 or less. He very quickly jumped aboard!

So last week since we took what Max is now calling a "hurrication" we only had two days of school. Really, how much damage can be done in two days to not earn a good score. So on Friday, I was actually anxious to see what he was given for conduct. 90%was his score, but still we got "talking" on one day and then just to cap it off "sticking pretzels in his ears at lunch" was on Fridays box. I mean honestly, boys will be boys and both Mark and I had to chuckle while at the same time saying, "MT, it's not a good idea to stick pretzels in your ears" and at that very moment I thought to myself, no more buying pretzel sticks, I must buy the regular twist ones.

Who says evacuation can't be fun?

We spent 3 days up in Dallas and it turned into a mini vacation for the kids. There's never anything boring about going up to see your cousins. The kids got several more days of swimming in and some tubing on the boat too. The boys have been jumping off the waterfall for years but Ella has gotten so brave this summer and just swims around my parents pool like she's been doing it forever!