"This isn't normal!"

So there has been some really interesting weather since we moved here to Nebraska. We have survived tornado warnings, severe thunderstorm warnings, and hot and humid days. Everytime something crazy happens everyone tells us "this isn't normal". Well Friday was no exception. The pictures below this post of Aidan's new bike were taken Friday morning. It was a beautiful day. Joseph got done with school around noon so we decided that it would be fun to take the kids to see WALL-E. We went to the 4:20 showing in Council Bluffs. Kael and Aidan were so excited....I don't know if it was about the movie or the big bucket of popcorn, but they were excited. We started into the movie and the boys were enjoying it. About 45 minutes into the movie there was a storm scene. The storm scene was really lifelike and kept getting louder and louder. It was like it was in surround sound and coming from the roof. My first thought was that it was some pretty scary special effects for a kids movie. Then the screen went black, but the storm sounds kept coming louder and louder. We were all looking at each other trying to figure out what was going on when a kid that worked at the theater came running in. He told us to hurry and go down under the theater because we were experiencing some high winds. We went down in this little cement room with around 100 other people and tried to entertain ourselves for the next 20 minutes. Finally they came in and told us that we were free to go back to our movies. They started the movie again....only they didn't rewind it, so we started back into the movie after we had missed around 20 minutes. We were just getting back into the movie and getting to some good parts when they turned it off and told us to go back under because we were officially in a tornado warning. Twenty minutes later when the warning had passed they offered us some free passes to come back and see the movie another time. We were walking outside when we started to look around and noticed that the parking lot was like a small lake and the decorative wood chips were all over the parking lot! "Wow!", we thought, "the wind must have blown pretty hard!" Then we saw that all of the handicap parking signs were tilted at about a 90 degree angle. We thought that was pretty interesting. We all got buckled in and started for home when we started to notice that there were a lot of branches scattered around. Then as we took the off ramp to our house we noticed that it was flooded. Seriously flooded. With about 3 feet of water that we had to drive through. When we got through that we noticed that there were no lights at any of the intersections. The closer that we got to our house the worse it got. There was a tree that was completely uprooted in the middle of the road. Joseph started to worry out loud about the little tree outside of our house. When we got home the tree was still standing strong, but here are some pictures of what we found.....

This was our beloved new porch swing, and that is our neighbors house. Yes it is mangled. However, it didn't go down without a fight.....
This is the neighbor's front window! Luckily they supply us with double paned storm windows around here!
Spencer and Parker checking out the damage.
Our neighborhood checking out the damage.
My poor beautiful flowers got destroyed by the hail.

Jon with Bo and a branch from their tree
Big branches that fell off of this tree by the Egbert's house
The park. Yes that used to be a tree.

Some of the hail on the porch swing.
Kael showing off some of the hail that he found
A piece of a tree by Rob and Amanda's house. If you look you can see where it used to be hooked to that other tree.

Same tree.....different view
A completely toppled tree at the beginning of our street.
More trees on our street.

This used to be a pine tree in the park. I think this may have been after the maintenance crew chopped it up. They were really quick at getting everything cleaned up.
More pictures of the park
Seriously.....some very sad flowers.

Joseph with one of the hail stones. This was one of the average sized ones.
The hood of our car. It's hard to see, but if you make this picture bigger and look closely you can see the hail damage. That sucks!! This is probably our least favorite part of Nebraska!



We were without power for almost 24 hours and it was crazy! We didn't even know what to do with ourselves. We had to send the boys to bed with our special emergency Cars flashlights that I got them because their nightlights wouldn't work. Then we went and sat out on the steps and lit the Tiki Torch mosquito chasers that somehow survived and were still standing. It was so dark, but a bunch of the neighbors came and we sat around and talked with our flashlights. It was a pretty nice day today so luckily it didn't get too hot without an AC. We survived though and I guess it just makes things a little more interesting! :) Kristin....you said that my blog made you and Jarom a little home sick?? I bet you are glad you are in Utah after reading this! :) Don't worry....everyone around us is safe!!