Hurricane Irene: Part 2-During Storm

According to the weather reports that we had been getting all week, Irene was suppose to hit our area the hardest Saturday night and in to Sunday morning.  So on Friday I was surprised when a huge thunderstorm hit our area. Before that, we were going to take the kids swimming in our pool at our complex, but they had closed it to prepare for the storm.  Deagan was pretty annoyed at that, and said in a very annoyed voice, "When is the hurricane going to be over!?" He had his mind on swimming, and he was not happy that this hurricane was ruining his plans! When it started to pour, I decided to take the kids out and to run in the rain to make up for that minor inconvenience, and it seemed to do the trick. :)

This storm was an unrelated storm to Irene, but it came at a pretty bad time. Because of it the ground was going to be super saturated when Irene finally did come, which meant that the chances for severe flooding were very high.  I started getting nervous about flooding in our place at that point since we live on the ground level, and as it was raining, we noticed a few areas around our place really pool up in that short time.  We had some neighbors out at that same time, who also lived on ground level, and they told us that they had never gotten any flooding in their place and they did not expect to get any this time.  That definitely helped to put my mind at ease a bit, but no one really knew just how hard Irene would hit.  

Saturday morning (the day the storm was suppose to hit) I woke up on went to town on cleaning the house.  There was talk of having the power out for over 3 days, so I wanted to make sure that I had it as clean as could be if that were really to happen.  I also caught up on all the laundry.  

It was late afternoon before I had finished everything that I wanted to get done, and from that point on we just stayed inside and hung out. It started to rain pretty heavily around 11 or so, which meant that a band of Irene had made landfall in our area.  There was some wind, but nothing too high or damaging at that point.  It rained pretty steadily all day, and continued to get worse as the day went on.

We were all feeling pretty stir crazy from being inside all day towards the end of the day.  We tried to pass the time by playing games, watching movies, and eating.  We also watched the news pretty much all day to see what the storm was doing at that moment, and it was really interesting to see what other areas were experiencing.  I have to say though that this storm was really hyped up.  Almost too much even.

We put the kids to bed early, and then stayed up to catch some more of the storm. We also took pictures of some of our hurricane damage that we had gotten up to that point:

Our door mat blew away!! Pretty severe right ;) 

Around 11, we were both exhausted and decided to call it a night.  I expected to be up a lot in the middle of the night because of the storm and the high winds.  

When we went to bed, the storm definitely had increased in intensity, so I was nervous what we were going to see when we looked outside the next morning.  What was Irene going to do to us!? Would we wake up with water in our house!? Would we wake up with no power?!

We just prayed that we would be watched over.