Crazy Windy Day

I used to be terrified of wind, seriously. I remember as a young kid going to the park to have a picnic with my family but it was windy outside, so guess what I did? I sat in the car while they enjoyed eating and playing at the park. Thankfully I got over that one but last Thursday, I had a little bit of that fear in me come back. We experienced (and by we I mean me and the boys while Lance was out of town helping his family move) one of THE craziest wind storms EVER! I have never in my life seen wind that bad. It all started around 1 or 2 Thursday morning. I was awakened to the wind rushing by and through our bedroom window. The air cooler outside was creaking with every gust of wind. It sounded pretty bad but I was able to get some on and off sleep through it. We got up around 6 just as the power went out and to see that it really was pretty bad. I ran outside to pick up our front door mat that had blown across the yard and take the wreath off our door. All the while trying to breath was a challenge because the gusts of wind literally took your breath away. Our trash and recycle can had blown into the backyard so I moved those up against the house hoping they would be able to withstand the wind there. It wasn't too long before this happened....

Ya that is our neighbors tree. It didn't survive the wind and fell down on the fence, mailboxes and across the road. This was just one of the MANY pine tree casualties from this storm. Seriously, so crazy. By now I had to run across the street to retrieve our recycle can that had blown to the neighbors yard. My fear of wind struck again as I was almost blown over with a recycle can in my hand watching our neighbors tree snap in half and go down. So freaky, sounded just like a loud clap of thunder. I ran inside and decided it didn't matter what else blew away I was staying put! Hence why we lost our BBQ cover. Ya, no idea where that one blew too. Since the power was out we had no heater to keep us warm and the house quickly went from 65 to 60 to 55 by noon and I decided it probably wasn't going to be back on anytime soon. So I packed up Ry and Cam in the car and we took off to my parents who thankfully had a fireplace to stay warm because they did not have power either. I could not believe all of the downed trees, power lines, and other debris scattered everywhere. I was most sad to see our cities landmark christmas tree taken down, tears! That is a big old tree too!

Anyway, long story short I spent all day at my parents enjoying the fire and watching the wind blow. It finally died down around 5 or so and our house finally got power back on later that evening. I picked Lance up from his sisters house after her drove across a couple states to get them back home! Yeah! We are so happy to have them close. We didn't get home until around midnight and went to bed thankfully without the wind howling anymore. We awoke to see the crazy damage it really did. Our roof looked something like this....

And this...notice the ones on the top of the peak just standing straight up. Nice huh?

Lance and our neighbor Michael spent most of the day friday fixing that.

Good thing Lance is super handy and not scared of heights. He had to get way up there with a ladder sometimes. Super high! I am getting nervous just looking at this picture!

Ryland wanted to get up on the ladder and help too. He is rather afraid of heights though and only made it up a couple steps before coming back down.

And even though we have no trees, we ended up with this pile in our "catch-all" corner of the yard.

Ryland didn't mind helping me rake them all up. We normally don't do this because we only have 2 baby trees that hardly produce any leaves so I think this was his first experience raking leaves. He had a blast throwing them around and helping me get them all into bags.

Yep 4 super full bags of leaves, I didn't think the pile was that deep either. So crazy.

Cam had fun watching us rake up the leaves. It wasn't too cold and he enjoyed being outside for a little while.

Ryland pulled out his bike for a bit too. We kind of wish it was summer again around here! :)

I love how our front porch light even had a hard time against the wind. I almost left it like this.

And my parents roof now looks something like this. Poor shingles just couldn't hang on.

So after spending most of the day Friday and Saturday cleaning up our own house and all of our neighbors, I am sure there are very few pine tress left standing in our city and surrounding ones. And no, I don't plan on ever planting one after this weekend! After reading the news they clocked a guest of 102 in the city next to ours and a gust of 83 right through our neighborhood! Yesterday they cancelled church and sent everyone out to try and get all the branches and such taken to the dump because of a forecasted windstorm Sunday night. So once again the neighborhood rallied together and got everything cleaned up and taken to dumps. It is great to be part of such a wonderful neighborhood. Thankfully the wind did not blow near as hard last night. Lance sure is beat after 3 full days of working working and working! He has bruises and scratches up and down his arms! I am so happy to married to such a great guy who is so willing to step in and help wherever he can. Speaking of married, we celebrated our 6 year anniversary on the 3rd as well. 6 blissful years! We had a great time celebrating Saturday night, but sorry no pictures. But we did get our Christmas stuff up last week as well. Love this picture of Ry and Lance by the tree. Happy holidays everyone!

And just because this is too cute. Look what Cam can do now! Yeaaaa!