The Wind Huffed and it Puffed...

...and it (almost) blew our house down! Night before last we woke up to the sound (or lack of) that occurs when your electricity goes out. As I sat up in bed, I heard an eerie whistling sound followed almost immediately by the sound of 87mph winds pummeling our house. We could feel the vibration of the house shaking and the roof trying to come off. I screamed "I think it's a tornado!" as we both jumped out of bed. By this time, the older three boys had already woken up so I yelled up to them to run down stairs and get under the stairs while I ran up to get Noah out of his crib. The adrenaline kicked in and I made it up the stairs and back down by the time the others got down and wasn't even out of breath! (Although I'm definitely feeling it now!) Since we had no power and had no way of finding out what was happening and not knowing if more was coming, I called my dad from my cell phone. Luckily he had power and was able to look at the radar on tv and let us know when the worst was over. After it was over, our power was still out so we let the kids sleep in our room, but I think we were all too wound up to get much sleep. We didn't realize how bad the destruction was until the morning when we could venture out. Praise God our house was mostly spared other than some tree limbs and roof shingles, but several of our neighbors were not as fortunate. A few houses had their chimneys knocked off their roofs, numerous fences were destroyed, and several 50+ year old trees were snapped in two like toothpicks. One street over from us, just about every tree was knocked over. There are also some electric and telephone poles south of our subdivision that were knocked over. Of course, while we were under the stairs Andrew said, "I hope our trampoline isn't blown away." To which I replied, "I hope our roof isn't blown away!"

My brother in Allen also lost his chimney along with their fence and a tree. My dad's plane was heavily damaged at the McKinney Airport. As I'm writing this, there was a story on the news confirming that there was a tornado mixed in with the straight line winds.

I've had several people ask if we heard the tornado sirens and no, we did not. The only way to hear them from our house is if everything is completely silent (which is usually not the case in a storm)! I think we will definitely be buying a battery powered weather radio to have for the future. All I can say is I am glad the forecast is for sunny weather for the next several days!