After the Tornado

As I mentioned last week, there were lots of tornados in AL. My family is safe though, and the power came back on after 5 days. Because of the power outages, my family decided to pack up and leave for Atlanta... After all, we had just gotten season passes the week before for Stone Mountain, so why not? :) After a chaotic day getting ready to leave - it took an hour or two just to find somewhere to get gas - we were ready to go. We drove and drove and drove and stopped at I-HOP for dinner. :) Then after dinner we checked into our hotel, and hit the sheets. :) The next morning we went to Stone Mountain. It was lots of fun. Since the week before we didn't see much of the park, we decided to do whatever Liam wanted. :) Plus, he was the birthday boy. So our day consisted of a playground type thing, mini golf, a train ride around the mountain, a 4-D movie, fudge, glass blowing (we just watched), and a petting zoo. :) (Pictures to follow... I promise.) After we got back to the hotel, we had birthday cake and presents, then we watched movies.

On Saturday we went to the park again, and played cricket, and learned about the Frontier Days (It was Frontier Days that weekend at the park). It was a pretty fun day. :) I also learned how to make sounds like an indian. :) Instead of making sound and hitting your mouth like you did when you were a kid - hard to believe you were doing it wrong all these years... Haha. :) - you do one of two things depending on whether you are a girl or a boy. The female indians would quickly say, "Lululululululululu," at the top of their lungs, and the males would make a war cry which would just be a sound to make something or someone scared. Pretty simple really. :) After we were done with the Frontier Days, we went back to the hotel and swam and hung out for a couple of hours, then we headed back to the park for the laser show, which was AWESOME!!! :)

On Sunday we packed up and decided to drive home and drop off dad and then pack back up to drive to North Carolina to visit with friends until the power came back on. As we got closer and closer to home though, neighborhoods down the road from ours were slowly getting power back, so we just decided to stay home. After we got home we hung out outside with neighbors. Once it started to get closer to dinner time we packed up our food, and got ready to head out down the road to a friends house for a barbecue. Right as we were about to leave our garage door broke, so we started to fix it. As we were fixing it (with the help of all our neighbors) it began to get dark. Because of the power outages, there was a curfew making it so that we had to be wherever we were going by 30 minutes after sunset or we could get in trouble. We had yet to eat dinner yet, so after a couple hours of struggling to fix the garage door, we packed up our wagon and headed off to dinner. :) It was fun walking in the dark, with flashlights, but still in the dark with all the pretty stars out. :) Dinner was awesome, and then after we finished eating we heard the news that Osama Bin Laden had been killed, so our friends hooked up their TV to the generator so that we could hear Obama's speech. After his speech was over my family went home, and S and I spent the night. :)

The next day we cleaned, and then the power came back on. That night we partied and watched Charlie St. Cloud, Easy A, and Labor Pains, all really good movies. :) It was a fun night. :) On Tuesday we cleaned some more, and then it began to rain, so a pool party was canceled. The next day we went back to school. On Thursday I took my APLit test and my Chem II final (It was just a lab, and I got a 100 :). ) Then on Friday I took my APLit final (a vocab test we had missed the week before because of the bad weather, so my teacher decided to just make it count as our final) and my Gov final (which I hope went well... We will see within the next few days.). It feels so good to be done with tests. :) And with this being my very last week of my senior year, I am SUPER excited. :)

On Saturday my mom, dad, sister and I went and helped clean up from the tornado. It was really nice seeing all the people willing to serve others in their time of need, and it felt really good doing service. After hours of cleaning up yards, and cutting down fallen trees, my dad drove us around to see some of the areas where some of the tornadoes hit. It was really sad seeing areas where one house was perfectly fine, and then next door the house was completely gone, crumpled into pieces, sometimes without as little as a foundation left. We drove next to where a Piggly Wiggly once was, next to a bank, and you couldn't even tell what it was, because it was so destroyed. After seeing all of the destruction, it helped me to feel so blessed and grateful for the safety that my family was provided. My mom was telling me how just after the tornados hit she was driving through some of those areas. She had been in the car coming home from Montgomery when the destruction happened. Seeing it, and being there to physically help clean up can really make you appreciate what you have.

It has been a bit of a crazy week, and one I will never forget. I am so grateful for my family, and my home, and power, and many other things. I am also so thankful to be alive and safe.