Stormy Weather

Hubby arrived home from a biochemistry conference on Thursday afternoon, just in time to meet Big Brother and me at our Hospital for our hospital "tour" (in quotes because the Labor & Delivery unit was overflowing with laboring mamas, so we weren't allowed to see any labor or post-partum rooms since they were full).

Friday, he took a vacation day to spend with us after being away for 7 days, and I was so thankful to have him around.  We spent the morning doing our bi-monthly grocery shopping (something I can no longer do alone with Big Brother until after Baby arrives since I start having contractions if I spend too much energy lifting Big Brother in and out of shopping carts and pushing heavy carts around buying 2-3 weeks worth of food and milk!) and got home just before the severe weather rolled in.

We had to wake Big Brother from his nap and get into our safe place: i.e. our coat closet, which is a tiny room, approximately 2' x 2'.... BB found it hilarious that Daddy was holding him underneath the hanging bar and that Mommy was sticking her belly around them while trying to hold the door shut and also leaning her head out to watch the hail pouring down on our back yard and listening to the local weather reports tracking the storm over our neighborhood.

We were in the path of "the hook" of the storm, but we had no tornado in our area though one was reported a county over before it reached us.  We did have golf-ball sized hail blowing sideways from the West and directly into our house.

BB thought the hail falling (and/or watching Mommy squeeze into while leaning out of the closet) was hilarious, but Super Hubby was able to get him back to sleep for the rest of his naptime after we were given the "all clear" by local news.

Though we were silently hoping for "just enough" damage to our roof to have insurance replace it instead of pocketing that cost before we sell our house in a couple of years, we can't tell if that is going to happen when they will have to replace the siding and window screens around much of our home.  Hubby's car also got lots of ding-damage, but we are probably going to leave it as-is since none of the dents chipped the paint to risk rust, and we just can't justify 2 deductibles for the 2 different auto vs. home policies right now.  (My car was in our garage, thankfully!)

Here is some of our remaining "swiss cheese" vinyl siding (these are all pictures from my phone since I haven't downloaded the ones I took on our camera yet):

Our yard littered with hail balls.

The front (northern) half of our west-facing garage wall.

The length of our west-facing side of the house.  Our dryer vent took a beating too.

The triple-window into the kitchen took a beating.  The glass was all fine, but all 3 screens are torn and holey, and the frame around the upper part of the window is damaged in a few places.

You can see some of the damage to the window frame here.

Holes above the kitchen window.

30 minutes after the hail stopped, we went outside to survey the damage.  This was a piece of hail after spending that amount of time melting on the ground of a 75-80 degree day.