What We've Been Up To...Tornado Warnings and All

We're in full summer vacation mode now.  Life has slowed down.  Wayyyy down.  So down, that Madeline is starting to look like this:

We're taking her out of daycare this summer for the first time since she was three months old.  I have a feeling life with Mumma and Dada is going to seem really boring really fast.

Eric and I celebrated her last day in school with a trip to Portsmouth.  We enjoyed some time without the little one.  It feels so strange to enter a store with breakable merchandise and not wince.

Going from the daily grind to a sudden halt is always a bit disconcerting at first.  I feel like I should be filling every minute with fun summer activities lest I waste my vacation away.  If we just sit around and do nothing, I feel guilty.  But isn't sitting around doing nothing part of the fun of summer vacation?

Maybe someday it will stop raining and we can get outdoors again.  Then I will feel less like a mushroom.  However, we did experience a bit of excitement yesterday.  Not the good kind though.

Yesterday afternoon, I was in the middle of throwing together some blog ideas when my phone started buzzing. An emergency alert popped across my screen announcing a tornado warning.  "Take shelter immediately," it demanded.

Tornadoes? In eastern Massachusetts?! Nah. Was my phone serious?

I spent some time living in Nebraska growing up.  I seem to recall that in the Midwest, a tornado watch simply means the conditions are right for a tornado, while a warning means there's an actual tornado.  I'm not sure if this system has changed since the early 90s or if the warnings in this part of the country are simply different.  (Any Midwesterners reading?)  Here, a warning means the conditions for a tornado are right, but there aren't necessarily any twisters dropping from the clouds.  I did not know that at the time.

All I know is that when I saw, "Warning. Take cover!" flash across our television, I told Eric we should head for the basement.

It never ceases to amaze me how calm and unfazed Eric is by pretty much everything.   Despite getting the same warning on his phone, he remained calmly lounging on the couch.  "If you want," he shrugged.

 Umm, yes?!  

Madeline was napping through all this commotion, so I scooped her out of bed, wrapped her in a blanket, and headed downstairs.

I avoid my basement at all costs. I've probably been down there a total of five times since we've lived here. It's scary down there:

This kind of scary:

But not quite this kind of scary...shudder:

Once in the basement, we calmly sat clicking through the weather reports on our phones, ducking spider webs, and avoiding the water seeping through the flagstone.

Madeline is a pretty deep sleeper, so she snoozed on my chest soundly for awhile.  However, I guess I shifted her around one too many times, and eventually she opened her eyes.  The poor girl.  Imagine waking up from a cozy nap to find yourself in the kind of basement on which horror movies are built.   I've never seen her eyes open so wide.

I was worried she'd cry, but she didn't.  Once she got over her initial confusion, she seemed to accept that Mumma and Dada were holding her in the basement as a little unusual, but nothing to worry about.    That's trust.

Thankfully, all the fuss was for naught. We just got some really heavy rain. Twenty minutes after it started, the warning was over and we came back into the light.

I really wanted to go strawberry picking this week before the crop is over, but the weather is calling for more storms all day.  It looks pretty gloomy out there.  So instead, we'll try to tucker the Maddie Bear out the best we can with craft projects and puddle jumping.

Here's hoping it clears up a bit for the Fourth!  Soggy hotdogs....yuck.