Hurricane Irene

Lalon, Whitley Ann and Naylor. They had just woken up and so we're having a lazy-enjoy-the-rain-and-do-nothing kind of day. Watching a movie with milk and Fruit Loop snack; hopefully we won't lose power! This is the kids' first hurricane - they did great. When the power went out, Naylor kept saying, "the hurricane made the lights go night-night." When he'd play outside and a gust would come up, he'd say, "that hurricane is getting me!" - too cute.

Well, we've been watching Irene out in the ocean since the beginning of the week (when we had the random earthquake) and yesterday afternoon around 2 - 3 pm, Wrightsville Beach began seeing her come in. Annie had gone down to Wrightsville Beach Thursday night to batten down the hatches of the beach house and spent the night. Friday, after Naylor and Lalon went to school, Whitley Ann and I headed east to Aunt Christie's to take some pictures of baby Ella. Heading down, it was me and 2 truckers going east and I-40 West was packed. I've never seen so many boats heading west! Late yesterday afternoon, around 4:45pm, one of the first bands hit here in Apex - it only rained 10 minutes, but it was an intense 10 minutes!

Last night (Friday), around midnight it started picking up here with a steady rain and wind. Has stormed throughout the night and our power flickered for the first time around 7:30 this morning. Hopefully it will stay strong and not go out on us! As I'm typing this, it's about 9am on Saturday morning and the winds are getting pretty strong, but no rain at the moment. Hope Irene will keep blowing on by and head out to sea quickly!

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About 10 minutes after this initial post our power went out, around 9:30am. We knew it'd be out for a bit because we heard the actual transformer explode. We've had a pretty fun day without power, doing some coloring / puzzles / toys and even going outside when it wasn't rainy. Luckily, we had the generator hooked up to the refrigerator and Brian got the tv going for a little bit. Around 9pm the power was back on for good. Other than the power going out, we were very fortunate just to get some high winds which only left some leaves in the back yard, an easy enough fix!