Wordful Wednesday: Texas Tornadoes

We were right in the middle of a huge tornado outbreak yesterday.  If you're anywhere near Texas you've probably heard about it by now.  We were very lucky.  One of the tornadoes hit our street, a mear 2 blocks away from us.  We took cover when the sirens went off.  We lost power.  Then, I saw debris floating down from high above the trees.  It was weird...there were branches and leaves floating down from the clouds...much higher than the trees.  Then, I heard the tornado.  I had never heard one before.  It was just a constant roar in the distance.  We never actually had strong wind.  I think it kind of just sucked the wind away from us.  When everything calmed down, the kids and I took a walk around the neighborhood.  I couldn't believe it came so close!

The first 6 pictures are of the houses at the end of our street.

This is behind the back fences of the adjoining neighborhood.  There are no mailboxes on this street.  This is just how the tornado dropped this debris!



This is the nursing home down the street.  It took a very hard hit, but luckily there were no major injuries. 



This is a street in our neighborhood...one street over from ours...



Same tree, different view...



A couple houses down, more trees uprooted.  There's actually a house under there!



Luckily, our house didn't receive any damage.  We have lots of debris in our yard though.  As we walked around the kids picked up photos that we found...



There is also insulation everywhere.  Lots of drippy pink insulation all over town!

And shingles!  They are all over the street, our yard, and even in the pool.  We also found a dead rat in the pool, but I thought I'd spare you the picture of that!



As awful as these pictures are, this was by far not the worst damage in the area. 

Other neighborhoods and areas were hit much harder.  Its estimated that there were about 12 tornadoes that touched down yesterday.  We were without power for 6 hours because a tree at the end of the street fell on a transformer.  With all the devastation around us, I feel lucky that we escaped with only lack of power.

Wordful Wednesday is hosted by Parenting by Dummies.

Wordful Wednesday with Santa!

Claire is really growing up fast.  She's 9 already and although she know the truth about Jolly Old St. Nick, she still wanted to take a picture with him this year. 

I'm glad.  This mommy isn't quite ready for her to grow up just yet!!

Wordful Wednesday is hosted by Parenting by Dummies.

Wordless Wednesday is hosted by Angry Julie Monday

Wordful Wednesday: Going Baroque!

We went to the Kimbell art museum in Fort Worth the other day for a Homeschool workshop on Caravaggio.  They had a Baroque dress up station that the kids had a lot of fun with...

Wordful Wednesday is hosted by Seven clown circus.

Wordful Wednesday

This is Claire as St. Helena at our Saints Party this year.

She carved a pumpkin with symbols for St. Helena too.



She was very excited when she won first place in her age group for the pumpkin carving contest!

And, fittingly enough, she won a cross!

Wordful Wednesday is hosted by Parenting by Dummies.

Wordful Wednesday: Cat

Ok.  I have this cat.  She showed up on our doorstep when she was just a little kitten and we took her in.  She was precious.  She's still a beautiful cat, BUT...

She is the most troublesome, temperamental cat I've ever seen!

For starters, she meows a lot...really loud!  She insists on being an indoor/outdoor cat.  I can't seem to make her choose one.  We have a kitty door.  She brings in lizards, birds, snakes and whatever else she catches in the backyard. 

She makes a lot of noise at night so we put her in the laundry room to sleep.  Its her room...she has her own space under the stairs...a plush little set up for a cat.  However, she likes to let herself out and roam the house making noise.  Did I forget to mention that she has learned how to open our doors??  That's right.  We have door handles, not knobs, and she has learned how to jump up and open them.  She does this every night now.  A couple nights ago she let herself out much earlier than usual and woke us up at 1:30 in the morning.  (On our first day of school, I might add!)  My husband got up and put her in the garage.  I had to get up again at 4 am to put her in the crate in the garage because she would stop making noised with the locked door!

It's too hot here to leave her in the garage all night so the next night I put her in the crate in the schoolroom.  She made a huge mess with the litter box.  I cleaned the crate and got it ready for her again last night only she actually stayed in her room until about 5 am so I never put her in it.  However, she found her way to her clean crate and decided to use the clean litter box I had in it even though she has her regular litter box.  So, I had to clean her crate again today!!!

So, guess what we made for her....

That's right.  The cat has a box of shame!  Now, we really don't torture our cat...we just put her in here for a picture, but the kids get a kick out of her having a "time out" in the box of shame when she does something bad. :)  It's our way of laughing when we are totally frustrated with her!!

Wordful Wednesday is hosted by http://www.sevenclowncircus.com/ and http://www.parentingbydummies.com/

Wordful Wednesday

Claire made her first communion this last weekend.  We are very proud of her!

She's always wanted a tiered cake so I made her one. 

I used the same cake topper that was on my first communion cake!

Her aunt made her American Girl Doll a first communion dress too!

Claire did great.  We even had a little unexpected chaos in church. 

Two people had (unrelated) medical emergencies and had to be taken out by paramedics.

Luckily most of it took place behind us and Claire didn't see much of it. 

She was already a little nervous.  She did very well though.

My niece came up with my parents so the kids had a blast playing in the pool all weekend!

Wordful Wednesday is hosted by Parenting by Dummies and Seven Clown Circus.

Wordful Wednesday

Silly me, I thought I'd have lots of extra time to blog this summer!  That has NOT been the case.

Last week was VBS.  I volunteered as the guide for claire's class.  She lives for VBS every year, but it wears me out!

I've also been working on lesson plans and stuff for school since we start back Aug. 1.

Claire is going to read the American Girl Books this year for reading.  I FINALLY found something she likes to read!  We've just finished the whole Felicity series so as a reward I bought her a Felicity doll.  She was VERY surprised!  I'm hoping this helps to keep her excitement up about reading.

I guess we'll see. :)

Claire has now learned to swim!  I'm so happy.  Having the pool with a child who couldn't swim produced a lot of anxiety for me!  She took to it like crazy this year.  As with everything, Claire learns when Claire is ready to learn!

I also repainted our cabana.  I still have the laundry room, guest room and library to paint.  I don't know, but something tells me I'm not going to get all of those done before we start school!  I just don't know where my summer went.

Wordful Wednesday is hosted by Parenting by Dummies and Seven Clown Circus.



Missouri Vacation Day 5 & 6 (Wordful Wednesday)

I've been having computer issues so I've neglected my blog.  Luckily tech support, aka my husband, was able to fix it! :)

Here are the last vacation pics from our trip.  We drove home through St. Louis and spent a day there.
We went to the zoo...

Their zoo has a build a bear in it with exclusive animals so this was Claire's treat on the trip.  She got to get a new animal that you can't get anywhere else!  She picked a leopard.

We stopped by to see the Cathedral Basilica.  It is beautiful!!  I don't have good pictures of the inside because they were about to have a confirmation mass so we just peeked in for a few minutes.

We were told to go to Ted Drewes for some frozen custard.  Yum!!!!

We also took the Anheiser Busch Brewery Tour.  It was a great tour.  I told Chris it was his reward for going to the zoo earlier in the day. :)

They have an awesome facility!

 

And an awesome hospitality room!

We were in St. Louis the day that the tornado hit Joplin.  We had to drive through Joplin the next day.  We passed a huge caravan of ambulances and emergency help vehicles on their way there.

My heart goes out to all of the people there.  The destruction was awful. We were just on the interstate so we didn't see the main damage, but there was damage all around the interstate.  Trees and billboards were just snapped in half.  And they were getting more storms as we drove through.

We actually drove most of the way from St. Louis to Tulsa in heavy thunderstorms.  We considered staying in St. Louis an extra day, but there were tornadic thunderstorms in the forecast for the next day so we decided to just drive through the regular thunderstorms.  Thank goodness for modern weather forecasting.  Since the storms don't build up until the afternoon we were able to leave Tulsa and drive home the last day and get in before the tornadic storms hit.  And there were tornadoes that night.  Several touched down here in north Texas and Oklahoma.  Pretty much all the places we had been earlier in the day!  Our sirens went off, but we didn't have a tornado.

Our trip was great, but after the drive back, we were very thankful to be home and safe!

Wordful Wednesday is hosted by seven clown circus and Parenting by dummies.

Missouri Vacation Day 4 (Wordful Wednesday)

The fourth day of our vacation took us to Springfield, Illinois.  We wanted to see all of the Lincoln things.

This is Lincoln's Tomb:

I felt honored to pay my respects to such a great man and president.

This is Lincoln's house.  Its the only house the Lincolns ever owned.  They have done a great job at preserving it.  They even have the whole street preserved with his neighbor's houses as well.

Inside of the house...the desk in the corner was Lincoln's actual desk.  The tour guide said he loved that desk.  One time a leg broke and Mary threw it out.  Abe found someone to fix it and brought it back in!  Lots of great speeches were probably written on that desk.  It seems really small for such a big man.

Us in front of the capitol...

at the Illinois state museum...

(which is free, by the way!)

The church we went to.  It was beautiful!

Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.

One more post to do about our vacation...I'll try to get to it tomorrow.

Wordful Wednesday is hosted by Seven Clown Circus and Parenting by Dummies.  Sorry, my links aren't working today. :(