Hello, 36. My birthday was on Monday. I turned 36. I’m officially heading straight for 40 and that seems really strange. I took the day off because I learned years ago that working on your birthday just isn’t all that fun. If I’ve got the days available, why not take the day off? Last year’s birthday was a bit of a dud. We were driving back from vacation in Port Aransas so most of the day was spent in the car. Forest had been sick that week as had several of us adults, and while the vacation itself was great and we celebrated my birthday the day prior with my…

I put together a short video of the second flood last week. For some reason I didn’t take a video of the front yard with the good camera, just my phone apparently, but I put some photos of the front yard in there at the end. Chris and I walked the neighborhood yesterday morning. Pretty much every house north of us along the creek had flood damage of some sort, mild to horrific. We are very lucky.

I thought about doing a second post titled ‘500 Year Flood Part II’ because that’s what we had Friday afternoon, but I decided I’d rather show pretty pictures of the garden a week ago and just tell a short story about the second epic flood in less than 24 hours. When we woke up Friday morning and as I had written the post about the night before, the water was still in the yard but slowly receding. The front yard always takes forever to drain and well, patches of it haven’t drained for about two months because it has been so damn wet this spring. I’m half tempted to start…

If you’ve been reading here for any amount of time you probably remember the first few weeks we were living here and it flooded. We’ve had a few simliar floods and smaller floods since then, including at least two or three others this spring. The most recent was the Tax Day Flood so it is very fresh in everyone’s memory. After that flood I remembered that back in 2012 someone had mentioned a massive flood in 1994 in Houston and that was recalled again so of course looked it up and was definitely worried about that ever happening again so I rechecked the floodplain maps for our county and was…

+In My Head Another year is just about over. I’m looking forward to 2016 and moving on from 2015. 2015 was a good year but the first half felt quite heavy. I’m not sure what’s going to happen in 2016 but I do know my parent’s 40th anniversary is in June and my dad turns 60 in September, so those are two milestones to be looking foward to. I had planned to try to work with Forest on potty training/elimination communication harder during this Christmas break but he came down with RSV and has been extra clingy, sleeping like crap, and lost his appetite, so working with him on that…

+In My Head I need to get back on the workout wagon this coming month. November ended up being a wash since I spent so much of it with vertigo. I still have the vertigo but it seems to be mostly when I’m laying down or when I’m dealing with a lot of action in front of me that has me needing to try to absorb and focus on a lot of things. We went to Moody Gardens aquarium in Galveston over the weekend and some of their tanks had me reeling. Christmas is around the corner and I am still in awe that we’ve come a full year from…

+In My Head FINALLY! The weather has cooled off, the sun has changed positions…it’s FALL! Ok, so, there might have been some mid 90* days in the last few weeks but in general it feels like Fall! That said, I’m now wondering where this year went. It seems like once July hit that the accelerator was pushed to the floor! It’s going to be bam!—Halloween—bam!—Thanksgiving—bam!—Christmas! I’m not sure I’m ready yet for a new year. Forest has had many ear infections over this last year and this last one from September that never quite went away had our pediatrician finally decide to send us to an ear, nose, and throat…