I marched blissfully ignorant into this evening as I drove home to get the kids. It has been overcast, rainy, and cold for the past few days but today, after a rather damp and chilly morning, it finally got sunny and warm. Knowing that it is supposed to cool off again tomorrow, I got the idea to take the kids for a walk on the boardwalk after picking them up. Tim was running late from work, so I thought it might be a nice distraction.

It wasn’t until I had parked the car, unloaded the three kids, and set off down the pier that I turned around and noticed the sky…

Hmm… looks like a storm, I thought. I figured it would start raining soon, so we hurried our walk on the pier and headed back toward the car.

But when we got back to the car it hadn’t started raining so we continued our walk down to the little goldfish park.

From there we went shopping in the local farm fresh store. When we finally meandered home, it was already close to bedtime and we still had to eat dinner. It wasn’t until I started getting texts from friends and family asking if I was ok that I started to realize something was up. We finished dinner and the rain started. We went upstairs to get ready for bed and the lightning came too. The next thing we knew massive amounts of hail, torrential downpours, and heavy winds battered the house. Lightning flashed constantly and the thunder kept rumbling. Naturally this all happened just as I was trying to get the kids down, so they were terrified. C kept whimpering that she didn’t want to sleep so close to the window, (I don’t blame her.) So when it didn’t show any signs of letting up, I brought all the kids downstairs to watch some Netflix so I could check on the status of the storm. When I looked at the weather app, I was amazed to see how huge and crazy the storm actually was! Finally it all calmed down and I coaxed the kids back to bed. I maneuvered C’s bed away from the window and pressed it up against Big E’s. Hopefully if it storms again tonight they won’t be so scared because they will be so close to each other. I’m praying they sleep heavy tonight!

If you’ve followed along with our family for any length of time, you probably already know how highly we regard nap time… particularly Sunday naps. Besides church, taking a nap is the most important thing we do on Sundays. After lunch we all lay down for about an hour and a half.

On rare occasions, like today, nap time backfires. You see, we all laid down for naps today, but while Tim and I were sleeping, the big kids were in their room, wide awake and playing, and Baby E was squirming around his crib.

At some point after we fell asleep Baby E started screaming. He had managed to get his leg stuck between the bars of his crib and the wall. His screams woke us up, and Tim got him safely out of his uncomfortable position.

Unfortunately this incident happened at that point in our nap when we were sleeping our deepest, so naturally we were very foggy when he woke us up. And he wouldn’t calm down enough to go back to bed, and the big kids were up, (because they never slept) so we didn’t get to lay back down again. And unfortunately, waking up foggy tends to make you a little cranky and move pretty slow. So our evening was a little rough, but everyone is now in bed, and hopefully we can fall asleep soon and pick up where we left off!