Where I live, we have been having some crazy storms lately.  Lots of wind.  Lots of rain. 

Rewind to two days before we left for vacation.  I wake up due to the wind…you know that it’s crazy when I could hear it over the fan and the windows shut.  We woke up the kids and told them to get downstairs.  We live in the country, so there aren’t any tornado sirens within hearing distance of us.  We decided to get them to the living room (a central room in our house) and hopefully let them go back to sleep, because after all it was 1am.  We had no sooner gotten down the stairs when my phone started making the crazy annoying weather alerts (1^st time having a phone that I have gotten one of those for weather).  Literally haven’t gotten a chance to turn off my phone when we hear shattering glass.  Crap. 

The kids and I spent the next 40 minutes in the basement.  Now… we don’t have a nice basement with furniture that we can sit and enjoy.  No, our basement is the basement of an old farm house…full of spiderwebs, short ceilings, and storage for stuff we don’t use often.  Needless to say, sitting on a cement floor for that long waiting for the all-clear was boring.  Hubby didn’t go with us to the basement.  He was trying to prevent the flood of water from coming in the broken window that had sent us running to the basement.  Probably not the smartest thing for him to do, but I wasn’t going to stay and fight with him about it. 

The other thing that we confirmed was that one of our dogs is TERRIFIED to go into the basement.  She has never gone and even when we call her, she waits patiently at the top of the stairs.  So here it is, storming away, and I’m looking at my dog at the top of the stairs hoping that if something really bad starts happening, that she’ll join us in the basement.  The other dog, love him to death, but he was too busy watching hubby to be concerned with the storm.  They say that animals have a sense of danger…I sure hope that’s true, but I definitely wasn’t getting that feeling from my dogs. 

Once the all clear was given, we went back to bed.  Come morning we assessed the damage.  A huge limb of a tree was now resting against our house with one of the smaller branches hanging through what was a window.  Hole in a piece of the siding.  Bent up gutters and facia.  The chimney in two pieces.  A broken window and bent window frame.  Oh…and did I mention that the siding and windows are five years old and the gutters, roof, and chimney are 8 months old?  Ugh. 

We got lucky.  A tornado touched down less than a mile from our house. 

We still went on vacation.  Nothing that a little plywood and some hardware couldn’t temporarily fix while we were gone. 

Fast forward to last night.  We had another wicked round of storms come through.  Luckily no damage to our house or property last night.  But there is something very unsettling when watching fully grown trees practically bend in half due to the wind…you just wait for the sound of shattering glass or the snap of something breaking. 

My poor son is now terrified of the storms.  “What if we have a tornado mom?  What if there is more glass breaking?” or the worst question “can you tell me next time so I can go to the basement right away?”  Poor guy… sorry, it’s not how the weather works.  Just because there is wind, doesn’t mean that there will be a tornado.  Just because there is rain, doesn’t mean there will be a tornado. 

I hope that he is able to relax and enjoy the beauty that is a thunderstorm.  Unfortunately there are storms to the south of us again tonight…I hope they truly stay to the south.  We are also in a tornado watch all day due to the conditions being right.  Being a kid is hard.  Being a kid who is worried about tornadoes whenever he sees clouds is harder. 

I love a good thunderstorm… the kind where you feel the rumbles in your chest and watch the fantastic lightning display in the sky. I’m sure I could read into that in all sorts of ways, but for now, I’m going to leave it.