Hailstorm

April 27, 2011:

The day Ryan left to go on a backpacking trip, leaving his wife and 2 helpless children at home alone to go through the craziest storm of our entire lives!
(That was just to make him feel bad, of course :). )

With the weathermen basically freaking out all day, and me knowing that Ryan wasn't going to be home, I cleaned out our coat closet under the stairs and put blankets, pillows, toys, flashlights, and lanterns inside before the storm hit.

We had to go in the closet 2x when the storm got so bad that I was seriously fearful for our safety. Gavin had a grand ol' time!
Times like these make me wish I were a care-free 2-year-old!

Henley was sleeping peacefully upstairs when the first cell came and pounded us with hail. I ran up to get her, and this is what she looked like for the remainder of the night.
I felt like that, too, Henley Jane!

And when I say hail, I don't mean little hail. I'm talkin' golfball-size hail. And our tin-roofed sunroom with this hail made it deafeningly loud in our house. At one point, Gavin looked at me and said, "Scared!"

I went out between the 2 hailstorms and took pictures. It was eerily misty and smelled like Christmas. I think it was because all of the pine trees lost a lot of needles in the storm.

I really do feel bad for Ryan and the 5 guys he went with. They were driving ahead of the storm, all on their cell phones watching the radar go right over their wives/kids/girlfriends. I'm so thankful we were all ok!

Apparently our part of town got the worst of the hail.
We thankfully didn't have a lot of damage. This is what our sidewalk looks like today, 2 weeks later. It's like the hail pressure washed it!

The weirdest thing was the next morning, there were leaves everywhere. Like the middle of Fall, but with green leaves. I've never seen anything like it. And all of our flowers that were blooming were totally destroyed.

Our grill was already in pretty bad shape. I think it's done for now.

Our aluminum siding on our sunroom got the worst of it. You can see the hail pings under the window if you blow the picture up. An insurance adjuster came out to look at it yesterday and said the entire roof has holes in it and needs to be replaced. That makes sense! When I was cleaning up the day after the storm, I found silver shavings all over the sunroom floor.

Unfortunately for Gavin, most of the toys outside got destroyed. Eggs were left out in the yard from an Easter Egg Hunt we never finished. They were demolished! We gathered all the pieces to take a picture:

Thankfully the only car damage was to Gavin's jeep.
(Busted blue light on the left)

And his poor favorite dump truck:

The cover Ryan made for Gavin's sandbox:

Our roof and some siding will have to be replaced, but nothing else major. So thankful for our safety and for Ryan's as he was traveling. There are so many other people that lost so much more in this storm, so we truly are thankful!