What a day!!

I woke up as usual at 5 am for work. My workday went fine, just a typical day at work. I called on my way home from work and told the kids and my nephew to be ready so that we could go to dinner and the mall. When I got home they jumped into the car and off we went. We had Chinese for dinner. I tried to convince Joey that I didn't have any money for dinner so he needed to pick up the tab. He didn't fall for it though.



My fortune read: "A smile is nearly always inspired by another smile."




After dinner we hit the mall. Approximately five minutes into our shopping spree (daughter & myself were at Maurices) a woman came over the loud speaker "TORNADO WARNING, ALL CUSTOMERS PLEASE GO TO ELDER-BEERMAN." Actually at that point we couldn't hear what she was saying, but a younger boy that looked to be about sixteen years old repeated it to his mother. She looked at him like she didn't believe him and went back to shopping. I of course was being nosey. Right after that shoppers began walking briskly past the doors. Of course this peaked my curosity, so I had to walk out to get the scoop. The kid was actually telling the truth. A security guard was trying to gather up all of the shoppers and head them into the right direction.

Now this was great!! My boys took off with my eighteen year old nephew. We didn't go where we were suppose to, we took off to find the boys. My daughter started freaking out. Isn't it funny how siblings act like they hate each other. You have no idea how many times she has told me that I should have stopped having children after her. As I have always suspected she had been lying. She was in tears as we looked around for them, saying "mom, we have to find them." Finally we ended up finding everyone (as soon as they saw us they started running) then we headed for Elder Beerman.

A torando coming wasn't about to ruin MY shopping experience. I continued to shop, I was just limited to the confines of this particular department store. Better this than a KB Toys, although the kids would have loved that. Of course Jason said, "Why couldn't we be stuck in a Radio Shack?" I thought this took about thirty minutes, but the kids said that it was more like an hour (from about 6-7pm). I guess I was preoccupied, you know how a woman can be while shopping.

Finally they gave the all clear so we wandered out to the rest of the mall. The boys got some toys, my daughter a sweatshirt from American Eagle and I ended up with a few ornaments for my Christmas tree.

Finally about 8:30 pm we left the mall and headed home. Driving home my daughter was sitting in the back seat and heard a faint noise, she said, "What is that noise?" I was too busy talking to my mom on my cell phone (yes, while I was driving in the rain). A few miles up the road we heard it again, this time not nearly as faint. We realized that it was the tornado siren again. Damn it!! I just left that about two hours ago, don't tell me another one. We were driving out in the boonies so it was dark as heck out. We could not have seen a tornado coming if it was. My kids then started freaking out. We just happened to be driving past a police department, so to calm them down we stopped to find out what was going on. The officer said that a small tornado was sighted in Monroe (where we had just left). He said that we were welcome to stay in the community center and wait, but we decided to go home. I gave them the speech though..."if you guys see any cows flying through the air, let me know, I'll stop the car and we can all jump in the ditch and take cover." ;)

Well that was about it for our excitement for the night, but let me end with just this one memory from my childhood.

I remember when I was in junior high we had a girlfriend staying the night. My parents woke everyone up in the middle of the night because of a tornado warning. They got everyone out of bed and into the car to go to the nearest shelter. My dad pulled the car out of the driveway, drove around the corner then said, "Where's Rhonda?"

See they remembered to take the girl staying the night, but they left poor little old me in bed sound asleep. Of course they turned right back around to get me. We all survived so it was a happy ending.