Tornado Alley
On a scale from 1-10, how much fun is it to wake up to tornado sirens going off at 4:00 am? MINUS 98345!!!
Actually, I was already awake. I woke up a few minutes before that to thunder and lightning and when I looked at the alarm clock, I was kind of glad to see that it was already almost 4 am (after spending most of the previous night wide awake because of thunderstorms). Then the tornado siren goes off. We live about 1/2 mile away from it so we heard it loud and clear. I wake up Greg and run through Melissa’s room into Sara’s room, wrap her in her blanket, scoop her up and run back through Melissa’s room to get her up… she was already out of bed, and we all run into the dining room, where Greg had pushed the table against the wall. Yes, the dining table is our (probably not very effective) tornado shelter. Smack in the center of the house. Best we got. We have no basement, no closets along an inside wall, and the bath tub is along an outside wall as well. So I think the table is our best bet, and it’s just big enough for the four of us to camp out under there. So we did. And, since we have a nice view of the TV, I crawled out from under the table to grab the remote so we could see what’s going on outside. I HATE not knowing what’s going on during a severe storm. We were right in the middle of it, but thankfully it was a fast-moving storm. The weather guy mentioned all the counties under a tornado warning and said “….seek shelter immediately… go to the lowest part of the house… turn the TV off…” Turn the TV off?? Is he crazy? No way was I going to turn the TV off, I wanted to know exactly where that storm was!! The sirens stopped after a few minutes, but because we were still in the middle of the storm, and it wasn’t quite 4:16 am yet (the time, the storm was supposed to reach our town) we decided to stay under the table, and sure enough, the sirens started again. It was scary. Lots of wind, thunder and lightning, pouring rain. Poor Melissa was the most scared out of all of us. Thankfully the sirens stopped again after a few seemingly endless minutes, and a few minutes after the weather guy said that the tornado warnings were expired, we crawled back out of our little shelter. I wanted to send the kids back to bed.. today is a school day after all… and told them they could lay down in our bed. I knew I wasn’t going back to sleep, but I went to lay down with them for a little while, and so did Greg. Then he made the mistake of announcing he was hungry, and asking who wanted French toast for breakfast, which meant that the kids wouldn’t go back to sleep either!! Ugh! So we were all up, and Greg was in the kitchen, cooking breakfast before 5 am. It’s going to be a looong day, but at least we’re all OK and we still have a roof over our heads.
Today’s picture – actually taken today!! – is of our shelter. The girls crawled back under there for demonstration purposes.
The Daily Click 