Leap day to remember - Day 202

Today I am not going to post about anything I normally post about. Today I am going to post about miracles.

Last night at about 1:20 a.m. Daniel jumped out of bed and ran to the window. I am groggy and don't understand why he would do that, so I start listening to the rain outside. It sounded really loud and thought, "Mmm, it sounds like hail."  I keep listening and tuned in to the way the rain was hitting the house. Normal rain comes in constant sheets if it is hitting the side of the house. The sound I heard was more like if you turn on a twirly sprinkler. There were pauses in between thuds...like it was coming from a tornado! I jumped out of bed when my brain made the connection.

Daniel was already in the living room checking it out. He said he heard the tornado sirens. Oh man! I got really close to the window to see what was going on. All of a sudden it started to shake and vibrate. Oh no! This really scared me! So Daniel grabed the kids. Now where to go? We have no basement. the bathroom we have is right by a huge tree that could fall over, so we decided the living room couch was best. So we have no power so we can't watch the news. I grabbed my phone, but I just stared at it thinking what do I do? Suddenly my mom was calling me (hallelujah!) and she is watching the news. She gave us a play by play. We suddenly thought of Daniel's brother Michael who was only a few minutes away from us. We gave him a call and told him to jump in the shower. Daniel got dressed just in case. We just sat in silence waiting until my mom gave us the all clear. It was horrifying.

We waited a little while till we heard the rain and wind calm down. Then we put the boys back to bed and crawled into ours. Ben came running a few minutes later and would go back into his own bed.

We finally fell asleep. At about 6 a.m. my dad called me (he works nights with no reception and just heard the news) to check on us and Ben woke up. It was so cute.
He said, "Who was that?"
I replied "Papa Ed."
"What did he want?"
"To check on us."
" Oh ok!"
And he fell asleep again. This happened a few more times!

When we woke up we went outside to see the damage. Nothing big in our yard. The neighbors tree fell, but no damage. My mom brought my brother by (they cancelled school) and they said it looked horrible out there. We jumped in the car and brought the camera. They were right. It was devastating. Here are some photos.