Tornado Warning

The day Elinore was born was amazing.

Although, there was a slight hiccup in the day.

One thing about me, I hate bad weather.  It scares me, and I'm not talking just a little scare, I become terribly afraid and start taking lots of precautions.  I've slept in the basement with the kids many a night because of predicted storms!

Late in the morning, the day Elinore was born my mom came in to visit with big brother Caden and Caleb.  I was so excited for the boys to meet their baby sister!  I think they were too, but they were pretty nervous. 

After they'd been there for a little while, Keith's, my mom's and my phone sounded an alarm we'd never heard before.  We all checked them to find a tornado warning.  So I start checking the weather on my phone and we get it up on the television too.

Shortly after that there were a few different nurses that came in.  They were doing things in response to the tornado watch.  They came in to make us aware, make sure the blind was covering the window and move the baby away from the window.  They took head counts of how many people were in the room and advised visitors not to leave.  They came back with a blanket for each person in the room. 

All the while we were watching the television; I'm not used to that being available in bad weather, so that was nice!  It even seemed to indicate that the hospital location would be clear of the bad weather.  However, it did indicate that our house was in the direct path of the storm!  That was a little unnerving, but I was very grateful no one was there and the boys were with us and not at the sitters just a mile from our house. 

As we were watching that the nurses came around again and stated the weather warning was escalated for our area and we all needed to move into the interior hallways of the hospital. 

They brought a chair into the hallway for me to sit on and I had the boys come stand close, and I held in my fear as best I could.  My mom was holding my baby, and I wanted my baby.  She wasn't 6 hours old, I was scared, and I didn't have my baby.  I kept my mouth shut though and didn't ask for my baby; that was hard.  (And I wish I would have, my mom would have fought me over it, but she'd have gotten over it.)

We were fortunate that nearly as soon as we and all the other new moms from neighboring rooms had moved to the hallways the warning was canceled, the storm had passed and we could move back into the room.  

I continued to watch the weather and peek out the window though, because I still wasn't comfortable sending my mom and boys out into bad weather.  Keith was impatiently waiting for me to make a decision about lunch, but it wasn't even on my radar at that point.  (Radar, bad weather, ha! I made a funny.)  I wanted our safety under control first! 

The skies cleared up soon though, and my mom took two boys, who were getting ants in their pants from being stuck in one small toy-less room for too long, to lunch to celebrate their new big brothers status.

Then we just had to worry about our house!  We were going to send Keith home later that afternoon to check in on things and make sure everything was alright, but just after the storm passed, our Pastor came to visit.  She was kind enough to check out our house as she drove by to say that from the outside everything looked fine.  She said the actual storm that went through wasn't nearly as bad as it was said to be and there was little damage done around town.  Just a bad thunderstorm. 

What a relief!  We were able to settle in and continue to enjoy our new baby Elinore!