It has been so long i almost forgot how to do this blog thing but I had to get on and write about our last week. It started on Monday when school let the kids out at 1:00. I had not paid real close attention to the news and I just figured it was just another over-reaction to the hyped up news. The news people get more excited about the chance of snow so you never know what to believe. When the kids got home it was cold and misting but no biggie. By evening it was raining and it continued to rain for the next 24 hours and the tempeture continued to drop so we were having freezing rain. This could be bad. By Tuesday morning at 11 am a large tree branch had snapped off one of the big trees in our back yard. That's when i realized that this was going to get really bad.It continued to rain (freezing rain) for the rest of the day. By 3:00 we had lost power. At 5pm we were all standing out in the cul-de-sak with our neighbors in the freezing rain listening to the explosion of trees all around us. We could hear it all around us. Lots of times we could see the branches falling. The craziest sounds were of the different transformers exploding. We all just were walking around in amazement as we watched the trees shower down. The tempetrue was suppose to drop during the night and at this rate I didn't think there would be any trees left by sunrise! Since the power was out this gave us a chance to put all of our 72 hour kits and emergency preparedness to the test. The main thing was that we had a gas fireplace and that kept the living room and kitchen pretty warm. We lit all of our candles and Mark roasted up some hot dogs and we were good to go. It took hadley a little while to understand that she couldn't watch a video. When she asked I would take her to the window and show her the big tree on the ground. She got it.
We spent the remainder of the evening/night playing games. Mark and I told the kids different stories from our childhood that we thought the boys may have never heard. It was an eerie feeling as we told these stories in our candle lit house as we listened to the trees snap and fall on or close us. And every now and then the sky would light up a weird green color when a transformer blew. The kids were asleep by the fire by about 9pm. I was anxious for morning to see what the storm would leave. 
I awoke around 5:30 when my neighbor texted me wanting to come over. I was so glad that they were coming over b/c they didn't have any heat. I offered earlier but they wanted to stay at their house. During the night part of the huge oak tree in front of their house had fallen and barely missed their house. So we were all up pretty early waiting for the sun to fully come up. Once it did we started surveying the area from inside our house. Branches were still falling so it was still pretty dangerous to venture out. Everyone hung out here for awhile as we gathered with other neighbors and started calling friends and family to see how everyone fared through the night.
We had a few trees that are completly gone (look like toothpicks stuck out of the ground) and some other big branches fall out of trees but no damage to our house. Our yard and the woods behind us look like a war zone. I thought I had it bad until later in the morning we ventured out to the rest of Fayetteville and saw the major destruction. Many roads were completly impassable because of downed trees and power lines. We saw houses where the trees had fallen on power lines and completly ripped the power box right off their house. It was so sad to me to see parts of Fayetteville hardly reconizable any more becuase of the destruction.Kristen (neighbor) called and had us meet them out at the indoor Razorback practice facility. So the boys had a blast playing football on the razorback field with eachother. Then we took the kids and stopped to get some lunch. Restaurants that had power were serving lunch and were pretty packed as we all gathered and started trading stories with fellow Fayetteville friends.
We were greeted with electricity by the time we reached home. Even after only about 24 hours I was so glad to have power restored! I feel super blessed because there are still thousands of people with out power and we are almost to Monday.
Friday and Saturday were spent going out and helping people out in West Fork clear a path from their house down their driveway. Saturday after Mark and Austin got back we cleared most of our yard up. Mark got pretty good at using a chain saw and now we have a gigantic pile out on the street next to our neighbors pile. Supposedly the city of Fayetteville is going to come and clear stuff away but I have a feeling that we are going to need to come up with another plan on removing all of our tree limbs.
We have been declared a National Disaster area. I was told that they rank national disaters on a scale of 1-5 (5 the worst) and they have put us at a 4. Crazy. I don't know exactly what that does for us to be a national disaster but I do know we don't have to make up the lost school days. Yea!
Testimony meeting at church was nice and uplifting today. People were very grateful for everything and there were many many stories of people being protected during this time.
