The Wind is just A Whirlin' Around

Wow!

Last night was intense! The midwestern area had some serious storms move through last night with more on the way this afternoon. It was scary how bad it got so quickly. I had just gotten Annde up from her nap and the siren went off. By that time, it's really too late but we jumped up, grabbed the bean bag chair off the edge of the couch and ran downstairs to our safe location. Annde was pretty scared but holding up a good front - she kept saying "norado" and holding on tight, but she didn't cry. Our neighbor was driving home at the time and he said that he was swerving left and right on the road to avoid trees/branches coming down. Nickie was in the back crying because it was so scary. I am glad that all 3 of us were at home!! We beat the storm by about 20 minutes.

Once the siren turned off - along with our power - we went outside to assess the damage. We have tree branches down but damage to our home. We were very lucky - Our street was spared in alot of the damage... a lot of uprooted trees but no serious damage to homes or streets. Some of the sub has power. Luckily - my hubby went out and bought us a big powerful generator! (Finally - we've had rolling power outages for the last several weeks and we've had them quite frequently since we moved in almost 10 years ago) When we got it running, and turned on the TV to see the news, I saw one of my fellow Sunday school teachers, Rob C. standing in front of his house, which was now sporting a large hole in it. Rob - my prayers go out to you and your family. Hopefully, no one was hurt and it's just re-building...

My daycare was also not so lucky. I take my daughter to an "inhome" daycare... Lynne had large branches down, no power, and there's a tree in her yard, 30+ feet tall leaning at a 45 degree angle. Luckily - it was leaning towards the playsets and not the house. I spent some time helping her move stuff "out of the way" this morning and gating off the backyard so that no one can get into the path of the tree . Luckily the deck - with all the bikes and stuff - is clear from the tree's path. Her neighborhood is BAD... tree's through home or across the streets, power lines all over. There's only 1 entrance (out of 6) even open into the subdivision. And, her neighboorhood is only 2 over from mine (about 1 mile)... I brought over a Dora sprinkler so that the kids can play in the front yard with it when the temps get up to 90 degrees with 100% humidity.

I do know, after seeing one after another in a tree or on a power line, I will NEVER buy a trampoline! I don't think I passed a single one on the way to daycare that wasn't in some place it wasn't supposed to be. I am glad that our playstructure we have is really heavy... Lynne's brand new $300+ little tyke set was physically torn apart by the storm. I will be probably over there this week to take it apart and re-put it together, while checking for structural damage so that the kids don't get hurt.

I took some pictures but with no power at home, I can't post them. My thoughts go out to everyone affected by this string of storms... Stay safe, y'all!! One more to go and then we should be fine for a while.

I was soo bummed because I couldn't get my posts in for Last Scrapper Standing at Create My Keepsakes or any of the pages I had done for the Simple Scrapbooks page call but I guess there was a higher power telling me to wait for something else. :)

Hey - winner for the RAK is Diana... Can you PM me on Scrap for the Cure site with your address so I can get it out to you... :) Thanks for all the comments. I am still going to look for a different look but I will probably leave the yellow for now.