THANKFUL THURSDAY

I am so thankful for our many blessings today! We were awakened this morning about 12:30 a.m. with an awful banging on our roof. It was a storm coming through with rain, high winds and hail. We jumped out of bed and ran to look outside--probably not the brightest thing to do--and saw the wind whipping the trees in our front yard and twisting them. As I stood looking out our living room window, one of our large trees broke off about midway and twisted to the ground leaving several huge branches hanging upside down. The storm passed quickly but our yard was strewn with millions of leaves and several large branches in addition to the one broken tree.

This morning at daylight all of our neighborhood was out surveying the damage. Each yard was carpeted with leaves and many, many branches were down. One neighbor had a tree broken off similar to ours, but it landed square in the middle of her new SUV. Another neighbor had a car window broken out by a falling branch. Several houses had large branches on their roofs and one neighbor thought the corner of his house was damaged by a falling branch

As the morning progressed we listened to the sound of chain saws as people began to clear and clean their way out of the mess. We were leaving town, so we left our mess behind knowing that our clean up would be delayed a bit because we are going to take care of Son #4's little one for several days. We are there now and have had a delightful evening with her. She is almost two and talking up a storm! She could tell us what she wanted and where things were. She was VERY definite about her bedtime--she did not want to go, but only fussed about 2-3 minutes and then was out like a light! Whew!

I am so grateful that the storm only damaged a few trees and left us and our house relatively unharmed. I sat up much of the night thinking about how bad it could have been in light of the spring storms across the country and giving thanks that we were safe! And I am also grateful for the chance to enjoy being with Miss Ella Bella for a few days.