Some Hurricane Thoughts.....the Morning After

Thank you all for your prayers and concerns and for caring enough to check in on us!! I'm happy to report that the Reed Family has survived our first Texas hurricane and we have come through decently unscathed!
We lost power Friday night about 11:30pm - right as the weatherman says "Well, things are getting bad pretty fast now!". It was rather a spooky way to end our connection with what was going on in the outside world! Don and I agree that one of the hardest things was the waiting. Just sitting and knowing that the storm was coming ...... and then just waiting for it to hit. It was nerve wracking!
Joshy did finally fall asleep in his closet bed and did better than any of us through the night. Once the power was off, so were the a/c and the fans, and Jessa and Don are very warm-blooded people! They were back and forth between our bed and the closet area trying to get comfy and stay safely away from the windows.
It was about 3am when things got pretty crazy outside. The wind sounded different than I've ever heard before and it was tough to tell what it was we were actually hearing. There were shrieks and groans and things that sounded like loud bangs or slams. The windows where whistling off and on and it made us wonder if they would blow out.
There had been a lot of warnings about staying well away from windows so I didn't dare go peak out at first. But we could see a bit from the smaller windows above the front door and front window......and it looked like it was bright blue and green lightening flashes. I thought maybe it was the cloud cover from the storm that was causing that - but come to find out later, we were seeing electrical transformers blowing out!!
I kept listening for warning sounds of tornadoes because we didn't have any news reports to go off of. Don's cell phone was able to pick up the radar weather map but that didn't give us any details...just showed the storm's progression. They say to listen for a loud roaring or freight train type sound. Hmmmmm......well ..............I thought I heard that about a 1000 times but each time I jumped to move into the closet - the sound disappeared and the wind seemed to lessen. Maybe it was just thunder twisted by the wind? Who knows? At one point I was sure I heard children's voices in the storm and I actually went to look out the window. Could have been my lack of sleep or just the twisted sound of Ike playing with my mind. But it was certainly weird!
Needless to say, it was a long and sleepless night. But God is good and by the time daylight found us....the winds had settled a bit and we were able to see that all our baby trees in the backyard were fine! No damage to windows or roof or siding that we can tell at this point. We actually regained power around 12:00 noon and it was nice to feel that a/c kick on and turn up the fans again.
We did a quick drive around our area and our immediate neighborhood is in pretty good condition. We stopped by our friend's place and they were all out and splashing in the water standing in the street... no damage for them either. God is so merciful - it could have been 100 times worse!
Thank you all again for your prayers! We can now say we have experienced a real hurricane and have lived to tell about it! Yay!!