Continuing......

Cody and Tanya brought Grayson home on Tuesday around noon. Cody made fajitas for dinner and Momma and Daddy and Tim and Linsey came that night to meet her. I did take some pictures, but only on Tanya's camera. Here are a few that I did take that week.

Old news

Tanya was pretty sore from having the tubal, so she and Grayson didn't get out those first few days. Her first outing was Friday and we went to Wal-Mart of course. Then we had lunch at a little tea room and dessert place. I had the caramel chocolate pecan cheesecake to go. Yum.

Momma came back Friday evening to get some more grandbaby time in and help out over the weekend. We took a few pictures before Clara and I left. Here's Bia with all the grands.

Then Clara and I headed to Kermit to stay with Tim and Linsey for the weekend. Chris was still telling me not to come home. We didn't have power yet, along with lots of businesses and the lines for gas were still long. We got to Kermit around 8:00 with the time change. Linsey had mentioned she'd pay me to clean her bathroom and mop her floors, so I had planned on helping her out (no charge of course), but she wouldn't let me. Instead we went to Midland on Saturday.

I convinced Chris to let me come home even without power. I had been gone over two weeks at this point and just wanted to come home. Clara had slept in four different places (would eventually be five) and was really starting to be a toot. Our zip code was scheduled to be back up on Thursday and restaurants and grocery stores were open for business, so he finally gave in. Sunday around 11:00 I decided to drive to Abilene and make the rest of the drive on Monday. So I called Aunt Jacki and asked if we could crash at their house. I gave her a whole 4 hour heads up. I'm thoughtful like that.

On the drive to Abilene I called our home phone and the answering machine picked up which meant WE HAD POWER!!! Poor Chris and the dogs went over 8 days without electricity. But that's ok; what mattered was that it would be on when I got home :)

Little Clara met us at the door when we got to Abilene. She was all smiles and squealed and clapped, running all over the place when we came in. She was excited about meeting another Clara I guess. Howard and Jacki fed us dinner and it was nice to catch up with everyone and meet Zach and Clara. My Clara looked like some amazonian pre-schooler standing next to the petite Little Clara. Oh, and the name thing was fun. I kept getting on to my Clara and Little Clara would turn around and give me this scowl like "what is your problem, lady?" So I had to keep specifying Big Clara. I had hoped to see Uncle Mark and Aunt Kelley, but they had gone to a party, so we missed them again.

The Clara's finally meet

We left Abilene around 8:45 on Monday and I'm really glad I split the trip into two days because traffic went down to one lane twice when we got south of Dallas. Both times we were in stop and go traffic at 5 mph for about 30 min. And I drive a standard. Not fun. We got home around 4:00 I think and headed up to The Woodlands for pizza with Glenn and Becky a little while later.

I didn't get that burst of enery I typically get after returning home from my west Texas trips. No washed dogs, dirty car, fence is still leaning, fridge is still mostly bare. It's taken me some time to get back into the groove of things around here.

As a side note, have I mentioned how much I love having this blog to look back on? I was reading the posts from when we got back from Abq in April and I wrote that I had been up once a night with Clara who was coughing. I really don't remember that. Well, wouldn't you know it, she started doing that Friday night in Kermit and has been ever since. I've been up with her, giving her cough medicine and changing sheets and pjs once every night around 3:00 or so. She coughs so hard that she throws up mucus. It's lovely. The coughing fits last for about an hour and then she sleeps for the rest of the night. During the day, she hasn't been coughing, just a runny nose. Weird.