First Dance Solo and Valentines Day

Audrey's beloved Gracie performed her first solo last Sunday and I took the girls down to see her! Audrey and Shelby Claire both loved every minute of watching Gracie perform and she was flawless!!! I was so proud of her, I can only imagine how my sister and Alan felt!! 

 Gracie's May May gave her some balloons for performing so well and she thought Audrey and Shelby Claire would love them so she shared them! She was right, Shelby Claire thought they were the best thing she'd ever gotten!!

 For Valentines this year, Audrey and I decorated and cooked supper for Clay. She was in charge of setting the table and she was so proud of herself when she was done. She couldn't wait for Clay to see it when he got home from work. I just love this age. She's got just the right amount of independence and she still thinks just about everything is fabulous!

 Cupid brought both girls Beanie Babies with huge eyes! They loved them. Shelby Claire loves anything that is soft and cuddly and Audrey still loves to give her little friends "voices" and pretend with them.

Our Valentines Days are so much better than they used to be!! 

Back to the 'Hood

Keeping of the theme of trying to keep things "normal" around here... I try to stroll the girls around our neighborhood everyday. These days that is much easier said than done BUT there is much more interesting scenery and lively conversations between me and Audrey than they used to be!

Our Mayor has promised to make our neighborhood look "good as new" by removing all the debris, trees and damage done to the woods, etc. He says that all the trees with twisted tops, scraggly limbs, or the ones leaning practically parallel to the ground will be removed. Great news!!

My sweet girls on one of our afternoon walks.

This car was left on a lot by a homeowner. It was damaged in the tornado and the house was destroyed. They do not plan to rebuild and intend to list their lot for sale.

Where a home used to be-- they have cleaned it all up and are ready to rebuild (I hope!!).

This is an example of the scraggly trees the mayor was talking about removing. Oh, and that house down there was completely secluded by trees before the tornado. It's a beautiful house!

In this photo, I am standing in the driveway of the remains of a house, looking into the basement remains of another house. So strange!

This is in a common area of the neighborhood. Places like this are what the Mayor promises to clean up.

There were 50ish houses in our neighborhood and 18 of them were destroyed. Three more are being demolished due to structural damage. Things definitely are different around here and I hope the Mayor can pull through for us!!

American Girl Store

My parents gave Audrey an American Girl Bitty Baby for Christmas. She loves that doll and has named her, Lulabelle. The American Girl Store in Atlanta has story times and craft days for girls and their dolls. Erica and I took our girls with their babies over there for the day to participate in a Bitty Baby story time. It was oh, so, fancy!! 

Audrey is not typically one who goes in stores and asks for anything. We tell her that the toys live in the stores and if we take them home they will miss their friends. That's working for us right now. Ha!  She is perfectly content with just playing with toys while they are still in the stores. That came in handy at the American Girl store!! 

 During story time, the babies got their own high chairs right beside the big girls. That was a huge hit for Lyric and Audrey!! If she'd mentioned it, we probably would have brought one of those chairs home with us!

 The story that was read was a tad bit long. It evolved numerous characters and I lost interest fast. You can imagine how the 3 year olds in the room reacted. Things started out great but soon ended with Audrey's feet in the air! :)

 After the story time, we had reservations for lunch in the boutique. This store does "baby doll" right!! They catered to Audrey and Lyric and their dolls and it was precious! They even had plates and cups for the dolls.

We left our house at 6:00 am in order to get to Atlanta in time. I was really questioning my sanity the night before when I was getting us packed up to go. It turned out that it was a great trip and the girls slept the majority of the way back home. We will go back!

Back to normal

We are trying our best to keep our routines as normal as possible for the girls. Audrey seems to be doing well and we are so thankful for her resilience. Keeping her on her normal "schedule" is beneficial to her and me! We took off to visit McWane the Monday after the tornado. We left all the disruption behind and went and just had some fun.

Fushia Kitty got to come and even took a ride on the bed of nails. 

 Audrey really loves the water table and surprised me by putting on her smock all by herself. She was so proud of herself for doing it correctly.

 Shelby Claire was wild and all over the place- just like she should be. She wanted to climb everything and touch everything and put everything in her mouth!

 Audrey has no desire whatsoever to ride a tricycle but she hopped on this "backhoe" and went to town!!

 The shopping carts are always popular with my girl. They are being replaced by pushing SC in the stroller though. Big sister loves to "help" her momma by pushing her sister around!

It was a fun, easy, relaxing morning. My favorite days of the week are those that I have my girls all to myself :) and we can just do whatever we want, whenever! I register Audrey for 4K soon and I am already seeing the days of having her at home coming to an end in the near future (Kindergarten). I'm not ready!! 

And then..

I left that day with my girls, their LOVIES, and a few random clothes that I could just throw together. I didn't know when we would be back. We didn't know how long the power would be out, how long the neighborhood would be on lock-down, etc. There were a lot of unknowns but one thing I did know was that I wanted to get out of there and get Audrey and Shelby Claire somewhere that I knew was safe-- my parents house 3.5 hours away.

Houses were strewn all over the street and as I was driving out, I couldn't even believe my eyes. As I drove out to the parkway, the shock and awe continued. This time it wasn't shock over the tornado damage but from the people. There were people EVERYWHERE. Since our neighborhood was on lock-down, the police would not let anyone in the actual neighborhood  by car. People had parked on the parkway and were walking into my neighborhood and the surrounding neighborhoods. It was amazing! It is about 3 miles to the interstate from my house and traffic was backed up all the way to the interstate. A lot of the people were volunteers but most of them were just plain old gawkers. Oh, and the media. The helicopters were ferocious and the news crews were on every corner.

I didn't stay at my parents very long. We got power back at my house within 24 hours after the tornado. We have underground utilities and attribute the speediness to that. As soon as I heard we had power, I wanted to go back. I wanted to see Clay. I left him Monday morning not knowing when I would see him again.  All I did was worry about him, our house and our neighbors the entire time I was gone. Plus, Clay was so busy trying to take care of our house and help our neighbors that he couldn't respond to any of my texts or speak on the phone for long periods of time. That Tuesday night, I texted him and said something along the lines of, "I am worried, I need information, if you don't text me back my head is going to explode." Well, he didn't respond!! 45 minutes later I texted him again with "my head has exploded". Y'all, he STILL didn't respond.

When he finally did call, I wouldn't speak to him. Ha!!

No, I fussed a minute but once he explained that he hadn't even stopped to eat all day-- that he was THAT crazy busy-- I understood. I also knew that I needed to get myself to him to help him. He also reassured me that he was fine, our neighbors were fine, etc. I felt better but still wanted to go home so I packed my momma and my girls up and we went back to my torn up neighborhood.


When I got home, this group of angels were working in my backyard. They showed up and just started working!! We'd gotten a quote the day before from a tree removal company that told us that it would basically cost us an arm and a leg to get the 15-20 or so trees out of our yard. These guys did it for FREE!!

 They had this handy-dandy piece of equipment that made MANY, MANY trips up and down our driveway. They were all volunteers and could only work for one day with this equipment so they couldn't get all of it but boy did they get a lot of it!!

 This was the remainder of our deck once they removed the trees from it. The day before the tornado, we couldn't see all those houses behind us.

 All the people and equipment in our yard kept Shelby Claire and Audrey amused for quite some time. It's unfortunate that Audrey learned the names of heavy equipment from this experience but if you need to know what that thing in that picture is up there, just ask her. She knows!

 The neighbors and volunteers were busy, busy salvaging what they could from their rubble piles and then piling the remainder on the street.

 The news crews were still there and stayed and stayed until they wore out their welcome!

My mom stayed until Saturday, when my Daddy came up to help us and to take her home with him. While she was here, she watched my girls for me and that freed me up to help a family pack their belongings up from a house that lost most of it's roof and to take care of "business" around our house. There were volunteers at our house every single day that first week a few of the days the next week. The local churches sent crews to our house and Samaritan's Purse came three different times. We began calling them the "Angels in Orange" because they wore orange t-shirts. The last time they came, I was in our basement cleaning out my car when I heard something in our backyard. I look back there to see about 30 people diligently working to haul out debris. That was also the day that it was my turn to be interviewed by a local tv channel. Of course, I had not fixed my hair, I had very little make-up on and I looked just like any other stay at home mom who was about to head to the grocery store!

My daddy hauling up debris from my backyard.

The Red Cross came through everyday for two weeks delivering meals. The churches would bring us lunch and dinner and just drop it on our front porch. One night, we had three different organizations deliver dinner to us by leaving it on our porch. It has been absolutely amazing to see how people can come together and help others when they need to! The Enoch's Walk crew came all the way from Georgia and the people from Samaritan's Purse came from all over the US.

The Red Cross delivering meals.

 We are not sure what sort of impact this will have on our precious Audrey. As of now, she's bounced back in typical 3 year old fashion. She asks very simple questions, "Why are the houses broken?", "Where are the neighbors?".. those sorts of questions. She has commented that we are "all alone" and she's ready for the neighbors to come back. She's even asked us when they were going to clean up all their trash! We will see when we have severe weather again and we have to return to the basement. In this next photo, she was helping us pick up the pine cones in our front yard.

 And in this picture she is "fixing broken houses".

The next photos are just scenes from the neighborhood. Progress is being made quickly!

These cherry pickers are awesome. The residents piled the rubble up from their houses onto the curb, making the street a valley between two mountains. These huge machines are clawing all the debris up and hauling it away. They are a one man show. He parks, puts out his stabilizers, climbs up in the control seat and then gets to work filling his truck. I have sat behind one of these trucks for 20 minutes waiting on it to move so I could get by. I've learned to not plan on being anywhere in a hurry. :) The guy in the truck behind him never moves. He is usually always in his truck but the day I took this, he'd gotten out to chit-chat with me as I strolled the girls. 

I'll keep posting on the progress in the neighborhood because it is fascinating to me and because I want to remember. I've heard of quite a few of the homeowners who do not plan to rebuild. This saddens me but I understand.