Just call me Dorothy!

Last night, around 11:00 p.m., a F3 tornado touched down in Manhattan. I had just laid down to go to bed and the tornado sirens sounded so I woke up Jake and we went to look outside and saw our next door neighbors coming up to the door. They have a house with a basement but they heard that we have a storm shelter down in the basement so the five of them brought their pillow and blankets and we hunkered down and waited for the tornado to pass. Thank goodness the only thing that happened to us was that our power was out for a few minutes. While we were downstairs we couldn't hear anything going on outside. I was just praying that we didn't hear "a train coming"! Everyone around here says that when a tornado is coming it sounds just like a train. The kids handled the whole situation pretty good for two reasons. First I had to wake them up to move them to the shelter so they were still kind of out of it for a while and then they thought that having their neighbor friends over "for a sleepover" was pretty fun. After the tornado had passed we looked outside and their was no sign of damage to our home or property. Come to find out the tornado touched down about 2 miles north of our house and if you look at the link you will see that it left quite a path of destruction. I have heard that 30 homes were destroyed and many more damaged. A True Value store was totally destroyed and the gymnastics place we sometimes take the kids to is missing a side of the building now (It shows a picture of this in the link). Also, there is quite a bit of damage on K-State Campus. Thankfully there were no fatalities in Manhattan, mostly due to the advanced notice of 15 minutes.

Kennady's Birthday Bash and I mean BASH!

Kennady's birthday was yesterday and I can't believe that she is already two years old!  We started out her special day with a severe thunderstorm that came through Manhattan.  For the first ten minutes, the storm just produced a lot of rain and penny sized hail.

Then the tornado sirens went off in town, not because their was a tornado but because there was reports of the storm dropping golf ball to baseball sized hail! And they weren't kidding!!!   I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Both of our neighbors vehicles got bashed by the hail, causing dents and broken windshields. Jake had our car at work and luckily nothing happened to it. The rain gutters on our house got banged up pretty good though. 

After the storm passed and we all got settled down, Tyler and Brooke helped me finish making a pinata for Kennady's birthday. Then, when Jake got home from work we opened presents and invited a couple of neighbor kids over to break the pinata and have some cake and ice cream.