It Was a Dark and Stormy Morning....

We woke up this morning to the sound of thunder and lightning and rain blowing in the open windows. Daddy was in Columbia, so it was just me and the boys. It was Levi's turn to feed the calves and he said "This is going to be fun." I told him I was really sorry, but we still had to feed them. He replied "No, really this is going to be fun !" Even Caleb, who complains everytime its his morning to feed the calves ran in my bedroom and said "I'm going out with Levi to feed the calves !" When they came back in they were drenching wet, so they had to go put dry clothes on for school.








I was supposed to substitute for another teacher this morning, so we went ahead and drove into school. When Clay and I tried to get out to go into preschool, his teacher yelled at us from her car saying we couldn't go in the trailers because of the storm warnings. So, we sat in the car for a little while until the tree we were parked under lost a big limb right in front of us. It missed the Explorer by about 2 inches. We moved away from the tree to the other side of the parking lot. Meanwhile, we saw Clay's teacher run across the street to the elementary. She got across and was waving at us to come over, so I got the umbrella out and we took off across the parking lot and across the street. The wind blew my umbrella completely apart and Clay was screaming "Mommy Mommy Mommy !!!" We both looked like we'd jumped in the creek before we got to the school. Once we were there, they said everyone had to go to the basement of the high school due to the tornado warnings and straight line winds of 85mph. The whole school district pre-k through high school was crammed in the basement and we were all soaked. At least I got to be there with Levi and Caleb as well, so we were all happy to be together. We were there for about 45 minutes (which seemed much longer !) before they let the kids go back to class. Preschool ended up being canceled and so Clay stayed with me and the kids I was substituting with until we could find someone to take my place.

Caleb & his friend Kolby in the basement

The storm blew out the windows of several houses, knocked down trees and power lines and poles, blew roofs off of a couple of houses and generally made a big mess everywhere

My Dad and several other lost metal storage buildings and many towns are without power.

When we got home we had to move several limbs off of the driveway before we could get to the house. There were huge limbs blocking the cattle gate and some stuck in the fence that we had to remove so the cows wouldn't get out. One whole cedar tree down by our pond blew over leaving just about 10 feet of the trunk in the ground. Fortunately nothing was damaged but there is a whole lot of clean up to do. When we were in KS, I really missed MO and all of the trees, but now after 2 ice storms and several bouts of damaging winds, I am really tired of picking up tree limbs ! But even that isn't enough to make me want to go back to Kansas.