A Little Too Close For Comfort

Sometimes the greatest blessing we receive, is simply the absence of something bad happening. This morning at about 3:30, I was simply laying awake, trying to go back to sleep. I sleep with earplugs in and thought I heard a noise and took out my earplug to make sure it was only thunder... I heard something else, the tornado warning sirens. So, I woke Brent up, he grabbed Mariska and we headed to the laundry room. About 1 minute after we got "comfortable" the electricity went out. Luckily, a week or so ago I plugged in our emergency flashlight in the bathroom just about 3 feet away, so I grabbed that. When I say comfortable I'm being very kind to our laundry room, Brent was on the floor up against our shelves of cans and Mariska's stroller, and Mariska and I were leaning against about 8 inches of wall sitting on a box of laundry detergent... The sirens turned off after a little bit, but since the power was out and we couldn't follow to weather radar and didn't know if this was one of those storms where it just takes a 10-15 minutes break before hitting harder, I was hesitant to leave the "safe room"/laundry room. So then we decided to just go sit on our couches and if the sirens went back on we would jump back in. We noticed large amounts of police sirens and had no idea what was going on. Brent stepped outside (the storm was really calm at this point) and thought there was a car accident at the end of the road. So, after about an hour and twenty minutes of being out of bed, I suggested we go back up to bed. We went back to sleep and just over an hour later Brent left for work, poor thing was SO tired. Once he got to work, he called me to fill me in on what was really going on at the end of the street... This house is just at the entrance of our complex. Across the street a fence was destroyed and a tree in the median of the road had fallen over, but was cleaned up by the time I went out there. I woke up a little bit after Brent called from massive amounts of helicopters, I had to jump downstairs and turn on the news. This was the only damage in Desoto, but there is much more up in Euless, Hurst and Allen... our power came back on around 7:30, although there are still thousands of people without power today. I guess in "counting our many blessings" we could go on and on with things that DON'T go wrong, like serious illness, car troubles, natural disasters, etc...
This photo is from a local news website, I couldn't get around to get a "good shot" of all the damage... you can go to www.wfaa.com or www.cbs11tv.com or www.nbc5i.com for better details on all the damage throughout north Texas.PS: On a happy note, we have our pre-construction meeting with our building contractor today!!