It's 3:45 in the morning and here I sit. Why? I'm so glad you asked. This is how my day has been thus far:

11:30 - Got to bed...finally

12:00 - Woke up to crying daughter who ate too much junk food today and puked all over herself while she slept. Bathed her, blew her hair dry, got her tucked up in a sleeping bag on my bedroom floor.

12:40 - Get back to bed.

1:30 - The alarm goes off on my special little radio that sends out obnoxious and loud beeping sounds whenever the National Weather Service puts out an advisory for our county. It's a tornado watch. wooo hooo. We get those all the time. Back to bed.

3:00 - A different type of obnoxious and loud beeping sound goes off. The red light starts to flash. I go running up the stairs, "Get to the basement! Get to the basement NOW!" The kids are champs and go heading downstairs to safety. I grab a few blankets on my way down.

Then I grab the alarm to take to the basement.

Silly me...It never occurred to me to check WHAT kind of warning it was. It's 3:00 in the morning and we were already under a tornado watch. See, the county next to us was being put under a severe THUNDERSTORM warning (hey...golf ball sized hail...). Of course, I couldn't tell the kiddos this because next time it really COULD be a tornado warning, then they wouldn't believe me.

So we sat in the basement for half an hour just to keep it real. Then I commended them on a job well done.

It was a good dry run. I was worried about how quickly they would react in the middle of the night. Now I know. Got all those sleepy heads of mine into the basement in under thirty seconds. I'm happy. I was planning on doing a middle-of-the-night tornado drill in the near future anyway. This worked out well.

Now they are in bed. And now, here I sit, because, hey! I'm not getting any sleep tonight because the storms are heading our way and I'm pretty darned sure that there will be a legit tornado warning for my area by 4:30 this morning. Why tease myself by lieing down in bed at all?