Tornado Update and Pictures

I'm tired and headed to bed soon, but wanted to post some pics that I took today of our home, neighborhood, and adjacent park. All of these places are within easy walking distance of our house, like an eighth to about a quarter of a mile. Lots of recovery and rebuilding ahead, but I can't tell you how encouraged I already feel by what we saw today. People are in good spirits, and we even saw residents of the most ravaged street in our area all joining together for grilled burgers on a lunch break in the middle of their street!

Basically, the update is that we were able to get to our home today to get some things. We have water now but no power still, so we are continuing to stay elsewhere. Soon we'll be moving back and readjusting to our new environment. There are absolutely no structural problems with our house. Hours of cleanup is ahead for us, but we are only out a grill, a bird feeder, and the contents of our refrigerator. We are so lucky. Silas is handling it beautifully, conceptualizing it as a big storm that caused many "broken" things and "boo boos," and he is already excited to watch the clean-up process. The construction vehicles are everywhere, and he loudly has stated, "That excavator is helping to clean the play place!" As a family we decided to spend some time in the park this weekend on a clean-up mission, doing our part to heal a park that we have so grown to love.

Thank you all a million times for your love and support. The promised pictures:

The playground at our park

Look closely: nearly the entire house is gone, but the mugs and plates are still calmly placed on their shelves in the cabinet.

 Yep, that's a guard rail hanging from that power line.

One of the debris piles in our creek.

Debates are going in our family...is that a surfboard or a giant chain saw blade sticking out of that house?

And here are a couple of shots of our deck and patio. Covered in muck and debris, but nothing that a little elbow grease won't erase!