Hurricane Party!

We hosted Todd and Tiffany (and family) and David during the hurricane. Our yard is mostly tree free with reinforced (with plywood) outside walls. Both of their yards have many large trees. (We were all more afraid of limbs and branches falling on our house than anything) David's family was already visiting Barbara's family so they extended their trip. I cleaned and washed like a mad woman all day Friday and Saturday. We rearranged furniture so we'd have more sleeping space in the center of the house. David set up his laptop as central command. We had batteries, phones, radios and anything else that needed charging lined up on the kitchen counter. We put the kids mattresses in the hallway (see last picture). All the big kids slept there. The two littlest girls slept in #3's bedroom with beds pulled close to the inside wall and closet. ALL of the kids slept soundly all night.

Sunday, Sept 14th was my birthday. Tiffany was sweet to bring a cake for a little party. I was not expecting my "birthday party" to turn into the "hurricane party" that it was...

The storm was horrible. The winds began to pick up around 10pm. By mid-night it was raining hard and the winds were blowing increasingly stronger. We watched the dark sky light up with transformers blowing like firecrackers. At one point, David decided to go home. He was gone a few minutes, then the sky in his home's direction lit bright. 10 minutes later he was back at our place. That entire side of the neighborhood lost power. We still had power at mid-night, 1:00am, and 2:00am. At 2:15am it was light's out...for more than a week.

Thank goodness for radios! We all slept on and off. The rain and winds were so bad we couldn't see out the windows. Ike was still going strong at daylight. The eye of the storm never passed over us - the winds went from one direction to the next in seconds. The noise that accompanied that wind change was loud, very loud, and scary. At 6:00am I was praying that the storm would just end. I couldn't handle the noise anymore.

By 10:00am things had quieted. We all ventured outside to see the damage...