Some of you may be wondering, others of you may be totally oblivious, but we were indeed pounded this week by a hurricane.  It’s kind of funny in the sense that it has been YEARS since our area was directly hit by a hurricane, so most people really had forgotten what kind of damage they can really do, but this “little” hurricane definitely was a wake up call to a lot of people in this area.  

I had hosted playgroup on Tuesday and was talking to some of the moms about their preparations for the storm.  Most of them really didn’t seem too concerned since Dolly wasn’t expected to be anything above a category 1.  Well, Dolly ended up being a category 2 at her strongest, and by the time she got to McAllen (which is about an hour inland) she was still packing the strength of a Hurricane (most had predicted that she would die down to a Tropical Storm by that point).  Anyway, yesterday we attended a birthday party for one of the playgroup kids, so we all got a chance to discuss the hurricane, and we all came to the same basic conclusion: if anything above a category 2 ever hits us, we are all leaving town!  Some of our area has been without electricity since Wednesday.  We were EXTREMELY blessed to only have lost power for 9 hours over night when the strongest part of the storm hit.  Also, there are a ton of areas that are so flooded that it has been difficult to get help to them.  McAllen, luckily, has done a lot in the last few years to improve drainage so flooding wasn’t really a big problem for us.  

The kids and I were also excited that we got to have Seth around since Wednesday.  The university campus closed down on Wednesday, and then everything remained closed after the hurricane because of flooding and power outages. (Yeah for us! : )

Needless to say, we survived with only a few broken tree branches, and we are glad we got to live through the experience.  Seth has been wanting to see a hurricane first hand since we moved here, so his dream came true this week.