Thank you Mother Nature.

We had some really crazy storms last night. It started around 6pm with these strange looking clouds. Dustyn, Kim and I watched as the clouds above our house begun to spin and create a circle in the sky. Then we saw what looked like an eye in the sky.

It was creepy.

Then the tornado sirens went off.

Kim rushed the kids and their pizza dinner downstairs in the basement. I stayed on the deck with Dustyn. For some reason I didn't feel scared. Normally I'm the one rushing everyone into the basement with flashlights and a radio in hand.

Luckily, the tornado warning passed, the sirens stopped and the clouds began looking normal again. Except this time, it got really, really dark. Like, black as night dark. And then the rain came.

Boy did it ever! It absolutely came down in sheets. Fast and hard.

Before we knew it, our back yard was flooding. Then our front yard. This is fairly normal, however the speed it was happening was very unusual. Our sub pump was running constantly. It was having a very hard time keeping up with the water.

We put the kids to bed and headed down to the basement to get everything up off the floor. While we were doing that, our next door neighbor came by and told us his basement had started flooding. And the house next to him had begun flooding, too.

We were just about finished piling things on tables and shelves when we noticed our window wells were leaking. Then water started coming in through the foundation.

Six years we've lived here and never before has this happened. Like I mentioned before, we have some drainage issues so some minor flooding in our yard is normal, but this was crazy. And scary. And there was not much we could do to prevent it.

By the end of the night, we had 1.5" in our basement. Our next door neighbors had 7". The house next to them had 4' in their basement.

FOUR FEET OF WATER!!

They lost pretty much everything. Kim went over there and said he saw boxes floating around in the water. So sad. I guess the water rushed up and into their window wells in their basement. The pressure from the water caused three windows to break and that's where most of the water came in.

We had a river in our backyard that had buried the new garden I planted. The water was about 5' away from the walk leading to our house. Our driveway was covered with muddy water. And we couldn't drive down the road because it was flooded so badly.

Dustyn was supposed to go to the city for his friend's birthday party, but we couldn't even get out of the driveway to take him to the train station.

This morning, all that was left was a soggy, muddy yard and a bunch of caked mud on our driveway and street. As of 10am, my neighbors still had one foot of water in their basement. They spent the entire day going through everything.

I can't help but think about how fast it all happened. Just within a couple hours! You never know what tomorrow will bring. Or even what the next ten minutes might bring.

It's amazing how a phone call, a knock at the door, a car ride or even a storm can change your life so dramatically.

I'm just happy and relieved that nobody was hurt. That storm could have been worse. Those clouds could have kept spinning and formed a tornado. Can you imagine how much different this post would be if that had happened?