Doing Great!

Thursday was quite the day around here. We woke up just after midnight to the wind. We knew it had the potential to be quite the storm, but had no idea what was in store. Sarah and Rachel both woke up around 2 a.m. and came to snuggle us in our bed due to the noise of the storm, so needless to say we didn't get too much sleep.

When morning arrived we were debating whether we should send the girls to school, but when the power went out & the cell networks were too busy to get calls through I decided I didn't want to risk sending the girls without a way to get in touch with the school should something happen. It turned out to be a good decision since their school was closed shortly after the school day started. Our house didn't suffer too greatly. Our vinyl fence on the North side of the house blew apart, but we scavenged around the yard and found all the pieces. Only a couple were cracked and we were able to rebuild it yesterday (we might need to replace a few parts eventually, but for now it should be just fine).

We also had some wandering playground equipment. I should have taken a picture, but our play land that is normally on the East side of the yard tried to escape, but couldn't fit through the gate on the West side. We also have several large piles of leaves that decided to nestle in for the storm by our front door, but that is an easy clean up.

Greg was amazing and stayed home from work on Thursday. He drove the truck around to check on all the family and clean up as necessary. I had called my grandpa in the morning and he said that he had at least 5 big trees that had fallen and were blocking his driveway (which happens to be a fairly long private drive). We went there first to see if we could at least get the trees out of the way, but his neighbors had already come and moved the trees from the driveway. It was very sad to see so many beautiful trees come down, but I was touched by the quick response his neighbors showed. He also lost almost all of the fence around his pool, but he has some insurance people coming to look at things before we start cleaning up.

After checking on my grandpa, we went to my mom's house. She had one tree that snapped in the back of her house, and had a 2-3 inch carpet of pine boughs, needles, pine cones and trash covering her entire yard. I think that emotionally that was probably worse than fallen trees for my mom because she always does such a great job keeping her yard clean & has spent countless hours doing fall cleaning making sure things were ready for spring.

Our family spent the rest of the day at her house raking and bagging the piles and piles of debris.

Following a run to the dump we stopped to check on Greg's parents' house (everything looked great) and drove past the cemetery. They had huge pines lining the entire East side and most of them were uprooted in the storm. It was quite the sight. It was really touching to see people joining together to move trees and work on cleanup immediately following the storm.

We worked through the afternoon, but stopped in time for the girls to have a shared piano lesson (it was too cold and dark to have them do more), then we went back down to my mom's house for dinner since her power was back on. We stopped by our house to see if we had power, but instead discovered that the door to the attic had blown off and cold air had been pouring through the house all day.

When our power was still out at 9:00 we decided to have a sleepover at Grandma's (which didn't disappoint my girls at all). We probably could have stayed at home because apparently the power came back on sometime between 10 & 11 that night, but the girls loved sleeping at Grandma's.

Friday we spent most of the day cleaning our yard and fixing the fence, and today we are glad that it is mostly done because it snowed last night & cleanup doesn't sound quite so fun today. It is much nicer to snuggle up by a fire and blog about the events of the week :)