WARNING - tornado!

Chris had to work today, so I headed off to church with the three kids by myself. Today is the first time I have attempted that - 3 kids at church without the help of Chris. I made it! On our way home I was talking to Chris on the phone and he told me that there was a severe weather warning until 5:30. Soon after we got home he called again telling me to head down to the basement with the kids, from the shop he could see a tornado. He called about 10 minutes later, saying we were probably OK to stay out of the basement, and that the funnel cloud had pulled back up. Then oh maybe 20 minutes after that a siren started blaring. There is an alarm system that goes off every couple of weeks saying "this is a test", only this time it wasn't a test! We are so close to where the alarm is announced that sometimes it is hard to tell what it is saying, but I heard, "take cover". So we headed back down to the basement. I was trying to figure out the best place for us to be and realized that even though we have a lot of year supply items, we were not really prepared! The kids didn't have anything warm to wear, or even shoes! I have lots of diapers downstairs for Kyrie, but all much too big. We didn't have a flashlight, which we didn't need during daylight, but what if it went through the night hours? I noticed our sleeping bags to keep us warm. We also have food, water, first aid items, toilet paper, wipes, and several other items that I guess we'd be okay. I grabbed a little mattress that we have down there and put it by us for protection. Chris came home and grabbed our 72 hour kits out of the garage and my laptop. Dusty was really scared, so we tried to distract him. I didn't have my camera, so you'll just have to imagine our safety headquarters. We pulled out the cardboard table, set the laptop on it and put in a movie. We pulled out the coolers for the kids to sit on, then out came the plastic spoons, pudding cups, vanilla wafers, and capri sun drinks. The fun had just started when we heard, "the emergency is now over". Whew! I'm greatful that this happened. I felt so unprepared that there is a lot more that I want to do to prepare, including making a list of things that we might need that I don't have in our 72 hr kits, but that I could quickly grab if we had time. At the moment of the emergency all I could think of was finding the safest spot in our basement, and then once we were down there I started thinking of all the things I wish we had with us. It's amazing the faith that children have, our 4 year old Hayden kept on saying, "We will be okay, the Holy Ghost is real". I guess he remembers hearing that the Holy Ghost can help keep us safe. During this experience we also learned that our window well had become home to a HUGE black widow spider. I pulled out the spectracide and now 1 1/2 cans later (just to be extra sure) that spider is a gone-er!