First Major Storm of the Season

Yesterday we had thunderstorms.  One of the storms just popped up suddenly without much warning.  Kent had gone outside to play and came in saying it just started thundering and he wanted to know if it was going to last long.  I looked online at the radar and as I watched the pictures were making me uneasy.  I kept watching the sky, too.  There was a wall cloud forming to the south that I was keeping an eye on from the front porch.   The tornado sirens started going off and I saw a funnel begin to form, it started hailing, and I headed in to get the kids to the closet under the stairs.  By the time I walked through the door ALL the kids were already in the closet on top of the vacuum and other boxes that were there.  They heard the siren go off and took off for the closet as fast as they could go and even took Quinn with them.  They made me a little bit proud to know that they knew where they should go and they shouldn''t wait.  I moved enough stuff out of the closet so we could all sit on the floor, added blankets and my computer and we closed the door.  I told the kids the electricity might go off and that if it did it was okay.  I opened a bucket of stuff I have set aside and gave the little kids each a toy and handed out a few books to be looked at.  That helped distract at least a few of the kids.  The hail pounded on the house and windows and it was very loud.  It seemed like a long time, but it was probably only several minutes.  After, the noise stopped I ventured out of the closet.  The yard was covered with hail.   We continued to have hail two more times before the storm ended.  Our electricity did go out for a minute or two towards the end of the storm, but since my computer was on there was still light in the closet.  I didn't have a flashlight with me.  It produced large hail up to ping-pong ball size and possibly a few pieces even larger than that.  The tornado I saw isn't reported to have touched the ground, but it was the beginning of a nasty storm that moved east and did form more tornadoes.  The van has dimples all over it now, but the windows stayed intact and there appears to be no other storm damage to our property.  Jeff was in Denton taking shelter where he was before returning home.

We are thanking God for his safety in the storm and hoping that when other storms come they don't have the threat of tornadoes with them.