Mother Nature taking revenge

It's true Mother Nature was not a happy camper on Thursday December 1st 2011.

About 2 am, Mike and I woke up to some serious wind, in the end it was reported that we had wind's up to 102 miles per hour. It was intense, I thought for sure our house was coming off the foundation. I kept running through countless ways as to how I would save my kid if the unthinkable happened.

At about 3am still unable to sleep we both got out of bed, checked on the kids and got on the computer's. Chatting with friends via face book at 3 am is always fun.

At about 4 or 5 am I headed back up to see if I could get some sleep, Mike followed shortly after. Only to have the older girls come up and tell us to look in the back yard to find this lovely tree. The house behind it is our neighbor's. This tree was pretty big, but apparently it was done fighting the wind and ended up in our yard.

Our broken swing set :(

Kendra and Tyler were out climbing on the tree.

The only thing we liked about this tree was the fact that it has the coolest branches ever, you can find them in your craft store for a pretty penny. But our neighbor's always let me cut some down to go in a big vase I have in my front room, so I loaded up today on some more branches as this thing will be gone in the next few days.

Mike had to go into work that morning around 11, these 2 semi's were blown over just up from our house. They were on the frontage road. They wanted to avoid the freeway as other semi trucks were tipping over left and right (12 in all I believe tipped over), well mother nature showed them who was boss.

Driving through our city looks like a tornado had hit, it is truly a devastating site to see. There were tree's down every where, power line's down, shingles off roof's and siding off of houses. Street sign's were blown away. Garbage can's lined the frontage road, there were swing set's that toppled over, trampoline's were crumbled to pieces, very sad to look at. (even Tyler commented how sad it was for what people had lost)

We lost power for about 12 hours. Schools were canceled for 2 days.

We were blessed in the fact that we had no damage to our home, just the fence (in multiple spot's), the shed has some damage to it and our poor swing set, but we are alive and able to live in our warm home, it could have been worse.

It's great to see neighbor's pulling together to help each other out, we live in such a wonderful area. There is still a lot of work to be done, but we will get back to "a new normal" city soon. And be a stronger community for it.