Josh and Becca Thrap and Family

After another late night to end the long weekend, I was somehow able to ignore the lightning storm beginning as I got into bed around 12:30 and fall fast asleep. This was fine, until about 3 am when I realized that I was awake and the tornado sirens were going off! I woke up Josh and asked him to check his phone for weather alerts and to see if he could figure out what the danger was. While he stumbled around with that I looked out our bedroom window just in time to see our swimming pool–full of water–get blown up, flipped over, and tossed across the yard! That sufficiently freaked me out! I have tried several times and several ways to move or turn over the pool to make it empty faster, even when there is just enough water in it to cover the bottom it is insanely difficult to move at all or flip all the way over, and this time the pool was really full from our party the other night. The yard was instantly flooded. That’s when I leapt out of bed and went for the kids. It seemed to take FOR-E-VER! Jacob didn’t want to wake up and Elise wanted to bring all kinds of stuffed animals with her to the basement. And once again, the timing was most unfortunate! We’d had all the laundry done before the weekend, but after all the parties and water play etc, there was a huge mound of wet and filthy laundry covering the basement floor. So there was very little room for us, other than on top of the messy mass. Also, 3:30 am is hardly the time I want to wake up my kids for an hour of family panic in the basement! They got thirsty, they had to pee, the wanted to eat, they kept getting in each other’s way, in short, they were then wide awake! After the storm had passed and we were finally able to safely go back upstairs to our beds, the kids did finally settle down and go back to sleep. Josh slept through most of it all anyway (on top of the laundry). When I got back to my room I checked out the window again and although my pool had flown out of view (it lodged itself under our deck, so we didn’t lose it) something else that looked even larger had been deposited in the field just behind our yard. It looked like just a big black mass, until a particularly bright lightning revealed that it was someone’s huge trampoline!