Wednesday night, we went to bed as usual. At 4:00 am, the phone rang. I immediately picked it up, alert. It was Jill, hating to wake us, but she thought we should take a look at the weather, as it was supposed to be pretty severe.
We turned on the TV and watched for a few minutes before we decided to wake up the kids to get them downstairs. Sheldon went down to start taking all the shelves of toys out of the closet under the stairs. I started with Aaron and Austin, thinking they would be the easiest to wake up. I was right. It only took a minute to get them out of the fog and realize I was seriously waking them up to go downstairs in the middle of the night. (At this point, we had barely even heard any thunder.)
Sydni was a completely different story. I went to her and started gently shaking and calling her name repeatedly. I knew she'd be more difficult because she's such a heavy sleeper. She said, "Are you serious?" I told her to grab her pillow and go downstairs. Summer was already awake by the time Sydni came to.
Next I went downstairs to make sure there was a place to put Alex and Savanna. Sheldon was emptying the closet, so I helped him. I thought the heavy photo albums up on the shelf which would be over our heads should probably come out too. As I stepped in the closet, the carpet was wet. (I'll come back to that later.)
After it was empty, I watched the weather for a second, then went up to get Alex and Savanna, alone. As I was standing between their beds trying to decide which one would be easier to awaken, I had the thought that I was glad there wasn't a fire. I started working on Savanna, and she barely came awake enough to get down the stairs. I had to practically drag Alex, as he's too heavy for me to carry. His feet really floated down the steps as I had him under the arms to guide him. He crashed right away on the couch and didn't remember a thing by the next morning.
We ended up watching the weather to see if they ever said "take shelter" (they didn't). I think Savanna was a little worried because earlier that day she had said, "I hate tornadoes." So, like in the balloonshop videos on youtube, she may have thought that she made them come.
We eventually went back to bed, but it took a while to fall asleep with the adrenalin rush. It was almost like when I was a kid in Indiana, riding out the tornado in the basement. This time, however, there were no frightened children thinking "please get away from the window, Daddy!"
Now that the weather is beautiful again, the closet was smelling very musty the next day. So far, all the toys are still in the entryway and the coats are all shoved into the other closet. Last night, Sheldon had to take out the carpet and pad and remove the whole tack strip (soaked) against the wall that backs the fridge. He could not find a leak anywere, but it was very wet carpet. I guess now it's just a matter of fixing the mysterious leak and maybe tiling that closet instead of putting the musty carpet back. This is definitely not the next home improvement project we had in mind.
