As many may say, the days leading up to the arrival of Katrina in New Orleans were surreal for me, yet unforgettable. I remember coming home from school on the Friday before its arrival and my mother carefully watching the news; Bob Breck was giving his usual forecast (for anyone who watches Fox 8 News, you know he gets pretty animated about weather). With that, I shrugged off the seemingly paranoid state the storm was producing for her. My parents and I went to the mall that evening because my father had to find a shirt for a wedding rehearsal he was to attend that weekend, oblivious to the events that would take place hours later which would make such a trip pointless. I remember waking the next morning, with my parents facing a choice: evacuate? stay? with the panic that was taking over the city. We left that saturday, at an inconvenience I believed at the time. I thought we would dodge the storm since that was usually what happened with my previous experiences with evacuating. I was so wrong. We didn\'t find a place to stay until we reached Arkansas and there we heard stories that our town of Destrehan (about 25 minutes from NOLA) was under water. My heart broke. My home was gone, I thought. As days, weeks, passed we returned with our home having little to no damage but I soon learned of the horrors for people actually living in NOLA. From the Luling bridge, which we take to get to the westbank, I could always see the city and it was so hard for me to fathom the New Orleans under water, and yet my town fine since it seemed so tangible, so close. We were lucky compared to the many people who lost everything. Life was hard for a month or so, but nothing I\'m sure to the families closer to the city. Out of everything though, I am so happy to live uptown today and see the people here now who are so much stronger from the experiences they\'ve had and see the city still making efforts to bounce back. Even more, my mother found out weeks after the evacuation that she was pregnant. I was an only child until my mother had my baby brother, now 5 years old. I refer to him as the Katrina baby, since obviously somewhere out of the misery, a miracle for my family happened. So if there\'s anything I can reflect on and say about Katrina, it\'s that I\'m so glad I got a brother out of it because all these things brought my family together.