Tornado Party

Whew, what a week it has been!  I really cannot believe it is already Saturday!  Where did the time go??? Go back with me to a week ago.  It is almost hard for me to think back that far, but let me remind you...  If you live in the Southeast or anywhere close, you will remember all the tornado/bad weather warnings.  As might be expected, The Lee's no longer take tornado threats lightly.  Friday morning when James Spann (Birmingham's weather forecaster who we will forever be grateful to because he is the one who told us to go to our safe place and within a minute the tree was in our house) told everyone north of Clanton to keep on their weather radio because severe storms that could produce tornados could pop up any minute, I went and picked Ella up from school.  Yes, a little paranoid, but better safe than sorry.  It ended up being a beautiful morning and it was kind of fun playing hooky.  We tried on shoes and then had lunch with my mom.  Doesn't get much better than that!

But we were warned that bad weather was still to come.  So, we were not taking the day lightly.  Our good friends The Baker's just sold their very sturdy, well built house and moved into a not so sturdy (built very quickly on a concrete slap) rental house.  Since Andrew was gone, we insisted that the Baker clan come over to our very sturdy rental house with a basement and full-house generator to wait out the storm. We had our own little Tornado Party.

But it was not just Carey and her kids (only 3 of the 4 came), Carey's mom and grandmother were in town for Baby Baker #3's birthday party.  And my mom was here for the weekend with us.

And Murray's mom came over since Murray's dad was out of town.

So, let's recap:

3 Lee Kids

3 Baker Kids

2 Lee Kids' Parents

2 Lee Kids' Grandmothers

Baker Kids' Mom

1 Baker Kids' Grandmother

1 Baker Kids' Great-Grandmother

That is a total of 13 people!

To say the kids had fun was an understatement!

When the Baker Kids and the Lee Kids get together, it is only a matter of time before the dress up clothes come out.

6 kids and 1 Daddy can only be cooped up in a house for so long before the wrestling begins...

And then after all the fun and excitement wore off (and no storms), they were still predicting that bad storms would come.  So the big kids passed the time with the iPads!  It still just blows me away how savvy these little kids are!  

By 8 o'clock we felt pretty sure that nothing too bad was coming our way, but we had already told the big kids that Ann Tatum was spending the night.  (Yes, we were planning on all 13 staying the night here.  Between air mattresses, Sara Wells mattress for her new bed and the couch everyone had a place to sleep.)

So, against all of our better judgement we all agreed Ann Tatum could stay the night.

Everyone was thrilled!

The spend-the-night-party started out great...

until the thunder started, which was about 2 minutes after the extremely over-tired kids laid down.

Needless to say, the-spend-the-night-party did not last very long.  But overall, our Tornado Party was very fun and very uneventful, which is exactly the kind of Tornado Party you want to have!