Crazy weather

As some of you may know, we had some crazy weather last night in Central Arkansas. This morning I noticed we'd even made the national news. (We never make news for anything good...hmmm).

Anyway, I knew it was going to storm last night but I had no idea that it would include tornadoes and such. Zac got home late and we were watching all the radar stuff on Channel 11. My mom called and told us to switch to Channel 7 because they were forecasting tornadoes for Gravel Ridge (our neighborhood). Zac watched for a few minutes and saw that the storms were SURROUNDING our neighborhood. He told me to put my shoes on and he grabbed Abby from her crib. We have a storm shelter in our front yard (crazy, I know) so we went outside.

Zac opened it up and got in, then I ran out (through the POURING RAIN I should add), handed Abby down to him, then got in. He closed the door and there we sat in our concrete underground box, with each other and a flashlight for company. EIK! Four years in this house and we've never had to get into that thing. Luckily Zac cleaned it out last year so it was not too terribly bad. We could hear the pouring rain, the storm sirens and a few REALLY loud claps of thunder.

Poor Abby was shaking and whimpering, but she was a real trooper. She hardly cried at all. After Zac made a few phone calls -- couldn't believe we actually got reception down there -- I started singing hymns to Abby to calm her down. Zac said a prayer and that helped her, too. She laid her head on my shoulder and I rocked her. We were down there for about twenty minutes. My mom finally called and told us that the storms were past us; they were watching it all on TV in their den, so they were close to their basement space. So we came back up and went in the house. We kept watching the weather because there was another line coming, but thankfully it went way around us. Abby was all wound up, so it was about an hour and a half before we could get her back to bed.

This morning it took me an HOUR to get to work -- normally a 20 minute drive. There are three ways out of our neighborhood and two of them were totally blocked. Of course those were the first two that I tried! The NLR airport was blown to smithereens...airplanes smashed, hangers with the roofs ripped off. Trees were uprooted just a few miles from us. Houses had trees laying on top of them. It's so crazy to think about -- I've never been so close to the actual 'path of destruction' before.

I've included three pictures of storm damage that was within HALF A MILE of our house. I'm going to try and take some of the storm shelter so everyone can see our concrete box. I'm so grateful that Heavenly Father was looking out for us and kept us out of harm's way. I'm also grateful for a quick-thinking husband that stays levelheaded in emergencies....I would be a wreck without him!!