Never Wake a Sleeping Baby...UNLESS...

...at 3 AM the Texas Springtime hail is threatening to come through your roof, or windows...or worse yet...BOTH! As was the case last night, or shall I say correctly, this morning. Lily tends to freak out during storms by lying quietly in bed whimpering and shaking. Which is odd considering her nature is to be pretty loud, you'd think she'd scream out for help. I freak out by panicking, so I jumped up to rescue Lily who had already be awakened by the loud popping and cracking sound of the hail hitting the windows and roof. Jerry was going to get Jade, and as I came back down the hallway with Lily clinging to me, he was just quietly standing over a slumbering baby. At this point I could hear the tornado sirens sounding, so I urged him to break the "never wake a sleeping baby" rule, and we whisked everyone down the stairs.

So I huddle with the girls in the only windowless room downstairs...our tiny half bath...while he does the manly thing and goes to check out the weather radar. Lily is shaking in fear due to the sheer noise of the storm and so we start to pray.

Lord, thank you for being with us right now. Please keep our family and home safe. And Lord when you think the flowers, trees, and animals have gotten enough to drink, please allow this rain and hail to stop. And when the angels have had their fill of bowling, please tell them to get their balls back to the racks so the loud thundering noises will quiet. We love you, Lord. Amen.

Silly sounding I know, but Lily and I both needed the humor. Just then Jerry returns to let us know the brunt of the storm is sitting right over our town. He tells us the radar color over our area is black. Black? BLACK! Okay, I'm no meteorologist, but black? I'm used to seeing greens and yellows...even pinks and reds during a heavy rain. Never black though. That is how fast and heavy the hail was coming down. It was insane. The good news though was that there weren't any of those little circles showing rotation over us! I cringe when I see those. But the sirens were still blazing so I thought we should stay put. Jerry wanders off again and I can hear him go outside and return. Is he crazy? He returns with a chunk of hail to show Lily. Its size wasn't that impressive, considering the racket it had caused, only that of a large grape. Lily grabs it and in her best 3 AM stupor says: Ice! We can't eat it though. We have to cook it first. Then we can eat it. I vaguely remember mentioning something like that to her about raw chicken once, but never about hail or ice...she's a funny girl, that Lily.

I know I vowed not to post about the weather again after posting twice about snow in March. But considering we had hail earlier this week too, I deemed it worthy. Monday afternoon the hail had hit us as well. Tornado sirens and the whole works. Jerry knows how I freak in storms (why I live in Tornado alley I'll never know), so he was so sweet to send me a text during the storm...are you okay? get to bathroom with girls and cushions from couch. I later learned that he sent that to me while huddled in his school's bathroom with 30+ middle schoolers. In our new house it'd be pretty difficult for me to cover us with a mattress since all our bedrooms are up. Couch cushions...smart! I was the crazy one that day though...not ducking and covering, but instead trying to minimize the dings on our SUV. When Jerry arrived home, he pulled up to see half of our Xterra in the garage. Our garage has housed a few projects lately, so after pushing all I could out of the way, I could only get half of it in. Doesn't matter anyway, it took a full beating last night. Thankfully the heat of a Texas summer usually pops them out.

Why such a fear of tornadoes? I can thank my dad for that. When a I was in high school, an F4 tornado hit a neighboring city. My well-meaning dad took me for a drive through the wreckage so I could see the devastation. 3 dead and over 250 houses either leveled or severely damaged. It was sobering. To this day, I have a picture in my mind of one house that was still standing though badly damaged. They had spray painted their house number on the front, for insurance purposes I guess, and then added the words "gone with the wind". I don't know that I would have had the sense of humor to do that.

Ever since then, I think I could easily be talked into buying some sort of tornado shelter. Just come knock on my door, tornado shelter salesman, I am your sucker! Can we get the model with the crib for my sleeping baby?