Dorothy? Dorothy? Get in the storm cellar, Dorothy!

Whoo-ee! It was a wild and bumpy day!

Today began innocently enough. We got up, did our chores, and got schoolwork done early. As a treat I took the boys to Chuck E. Cheese for lunch.

CEC is a rare treat for the boys. Every once in a while I get a coupon for a pizza, 4 drinks, and 100 tokens. The boys will use about half of them, and the other half get stored in the van for “rainy days. “ On those “blah” days when we need a little something special we will go to CEC and not buy anything, just use the tokens from the van. It’s fun, it’s air-conditioned, and it’s an easy way for me to be Surpermom for the afternoon.


The trick to surviving an afternoon at CEC with your nerves intact is timing. We only go when school’s in session, and we try to hit the building during naptime. We usually have the place to ourselves.

Today, after a rollicking, fun-filled time we headed home. As I turned onto the interstate, I looked westward and saw dark, turbulent clouds just west of town. I didn’t think much of it, though. I just figured we’d likely see some rain during the afternoon.

My cell phone rang when we were about 10 minutes from home. It was M., asking where we were. I began to chat about our day when he stops me and says, “Tornado sirens are going off in ____ (a small town 10 miles north of our house).”

My stomach nearly dropped out of my body at this point. Tornado sirens are wailing just 10 miles north of us, but the skies look innocuous. I hang up the phone and turn on the radio in the car. I learn that sirens are not only wailing in the small town north of us, they are wailing in MANY small towns both north AND west of us and the storms were headed our way.

I had the kids look out the car windows to see if the could spot any lightning. At least, that’s what I told them. I wanted them to be distracted and not talking to me as I concentrated on driving, and I hoped that if anything big and scary were baring down on us at least one of the boys might see it and let me know. We finally made it home and walked into our house to just in time to hear our weather radio alert begin. Just as I turn it off, the tornado sirens go off outside. We’ve lived here two and a half years, and this was the first time we’d ever heard the sirens go off. It was kind of a momentous occasion!

So we spent the afternoon in the basement. The boys watched an episode of “The Dukes of Hazzard” in the red room and played with legos. Colson had fallen asleep during the van ride home and continued to sleep on the couch. I flipped channels watching the various weathermen on tv. Eventually I found the one who looked the calmest and stayed on his channel. It turned out that there were funnel clouds all around us this afternoon, but thankfully none very close to us.



Thankfully we are safe. The boys had no real idea how many, many funnel cloud were spotted around us this afternoon. They just had a great time watching “Dukes of Hazzard.”

Prior to moving here I had a paralyzing fear of thunderstorms and tornadoes, but the Lord has really been working on the issue of fears in my life, and thunderstorms don’t scare me like they used to. In fact, I felt almost like a native here as I ran upstairs a few times during the warning to see if I could see any funnel clouds forming. An hour after the storms ended and the warning expired, I even took Braden to baseball practice!

Boy, we sure live on the edge!