Irene

As a lot of you know, hurricane Irene came up the east coast today! NC was first to get hit as it made landfall at Cape Lookout. We decided to ride this one out because we've had hurricanes (even category 2-3 before) and it's never been that bad. I forgot how scary they really can be though! Wanda, Gary, and Chris were set to come down here this weekend and arrived Thursday. The hurricane didn't really come in until late Friday night, and it came fast! All of the sudden on Friday night, tornado warnings were everywhere, we were a bit freaked out to say the least! At one point, the weatherman described a "tornadic cell" heading straight for our street! We all got in the closet, some of us freaked out more than others :), but overall we were ok. Once the tornado warnings died down, we all tried to get a little sleep. I was too freaked to keep Avery in her room so she went in the pack n'play in our master closet and I slept in there next to her, just in case. The winds were crazy ridiculous, I had forgotten how strong hurricane winds are. The rain was just beating on our house, it was eery. The only thing I kept thinking was thank goodness we don't have any trees around our house! Our county was under a voluntary evacuation, so we knew it was going to get bad at some point. We make it through Friday night and the sun comes up Saturday morning. Avery was still sleeping and a few of us go out onto the front porch to watch everything. At that point, we saw a TRAMPOLINE go flying behind some homes in the neighborhood. It was funny, yet scary? l0l Definitely shows you the power of these storms. Later that morning, we noticed our dining room was taking in water. It was coming in through our backdoor because the wind was blowing the rain right into it. It had already soaked half the dining room before we figured it out and was slowly spreading to the living room. The water was under the brand new hardwood floors Matt just put down about 2 months ago, bummer :( We put towels down to soak everything up but it didn't really help, as the towels were soaked pretty quickly as well. It's a very disheartening feeling knowing your house is flooding and there's nothing you can do about it but just watch. Sucks.

We kept power all of Friday evening and into Saturday, but it went out late Saturday morning. I was actually surprised we kept it as long as we did. The storm stuck around for the rest of Saturday and just would NOT go away, we kept wondering when it was going to die down and it felt like forever! Finally, it calmed down and our power came back on around 7pm that night, prety quick if you ask me! We grilled out a nice pork rib dinner and enjoyed ourselves. Sunday we got out and tried to take some pictures of the damage. We tried our best to stay out of the way of power trucks and people trying to come back home that had evacuated. I was actually surprised at how the coast looked. I thought it was going to look MUCH worse, thank goodness it didn't! Areas around us got hit HARD though. I didn't expect us to get hit so hard out there, since we are further inland. WRONG. There were trees down, flooding, fences torn apart, it was bad. Just say a prayer for those affected by this storm and the lives lost.