Tornado Land

One of the main reasons why I wanted to move to Texas was so that we could have better weather. WRONG. The humidity made it still feel cold here in the winter, we had ice storms, and now I'm learning Spring in Texas is not the best. We have had thunderstorms almost every day for the past month, with lots of flooding, and now we're entering tornado season.

I'm trying to enjoy the thunderstorms though, and this week we had a really cool one! We turned off the lights in our house and opened the blinds, and watched the lightning show while we ate ice cream. The thunder sounds like the sky is ripping open. We did have some pretty strong winds with this one, and I noticed this poor tree in our neighborhood the next day:

We had Rita, our neighbor, over to dinner two times this week. First on Monday, when her sister had a wig-out and Rita (and her brother-in-law) needed a little rescuing. Then on Wednesday we had Rita over with the missionaries.

On my day off I took Ava to the grocery store and she was especially good. When we were getting in the car, she asked me for fries (she asks for fries every day). But since she was being so good, I decided I would spoil her! I took her to McDonalds to get a Happy Meal. She was soooooo excited, it was cute!

A video showing her excited for fries:

On Friday Ava and I went with Brent to his last institute class since the missionary couple that serve here are returning home to Utah. Every week they have a speaker and then the sister missionary has prepared lunch for the students. So we got to eat lunch with dad and it was fun! Ava was especially good and quiet during the institute lesson. When we were leaving, I asked Ava if she had fun with dad at school. Ava said, "yeah! I eat!" We like having an institute near by!

After institute I took Ava to the library where a little boy saw Ava across the room, ran up to her, and almost looked like he was going to kiss her. He was completely mesmerized with her and followed her around. I snapped a couple pictures and sent one to Brent and he was like "run!!!! Creeper!!!"

We had a little bit of a sad Friday night where I had to work and Brent had to work on essays. This weekend is crunch time for Brent. We did get out on Saturday afternoon for a little Mother's Day celebration at Red Robin:

Ava thinks those baby rings are her bracelets and it cracks me up. We also went shopping at Kohls since I had Kohls cash but I couldn't find anything there at all! We got a few random things for Ava. So Brent let me run into Old Navy and I found a few things I liked! One was this shirt. Happy Mother's Day to me :)

Brent stayed in the car with Ava so I was texting him pictures of what I was trying on :)

Today for Mother's Day our tornado siren went off for the first time. We had just laid Ava down for a nap and I didn't know if we should get her up and go into the bathroom like we've heard you're supposed to do. Brent looked out the window and said, "naahhh, we're fine. If I see a funnel, I'll let you know and we'll go to the bathroom." Ummmm.  People at church said in the 40 years they've lived here, a tornado has never touched down in Denton. I just don't want this to be the first year!

So Brent and I looked out our bedroom window to assess the situation. Brent said, "this is not tornado weather, the sky will be green if a tornado is coming." A couple seconds later, I said to Brent, "green like over there?" Brent: "yeah, that's it!" Here's out our bedroom window:

We kept an eye on it and it didn't ever look like a funnel was forming. It passed by pretty quick too. Here's a video I took:

(You can't hear the siren very loud in the video since I think it was mostly picking up our voices, but it's pretty loud, like if a car was honking in front of our house.) The funnel formed a couple miles west of us, where our friends live. I stole this picture from Facebook:

Ava would like to wish a Happy Mother's Day to both her grandmas! We are so grateful for you and love you!!!