Sorry to have worried everyone! We've had only rain and some wind...nothing significant... so I never thought to check in with everyone. There was a tornado (a rarity) viewed by friends last night at rush hour about 20 miles north of here, but I don't think it touched down. The kids and new baby are doing fine! Everyone settling in to their new roles, and baby Melanie is only waking up once per night, so MOm here feels quite human! I'll try to post pictures soon. Thanks for worrying about me!!!

Glad to hear everybody is ok. We spent Wed. Night in the cellar. Here in SW OKC we received over 10" of rain and multiple tornado threats. We spent over 5 hours in the cellar and crawled out to find a river running in front of our house and as far north as I could see!! I think the flooding scared me more than the tornadoes. My daughter and grandson (he's 3 1/2 ) were here and she stayed overnight because she couldn't get home because of the flooding. I am ready to say enough is enough. Our house sits on a hillside to no water in the house, donkeys were in the barn, dogs in the cellar, so all are ok. I am dreading Friday and Saturday, I guess we will be back in the cellar, I just hope the rain is light.

Our dog has learned that when the neighbors visit in the middle of the night, he needs to go to the shelter. Not his first rodeo. LOL We only got an inch of rain this time so we didn't have the road closing problems that we had during the last big storm. I saw a small tree down on the way to church and when I returned home there was a huge tree in a downtown street in front of city hall. Half of my garden is OK, but things in the lower half look like life is over for them. In addition to the rain, there is a french drain that feeds into that area. It works wonders in dry years, and in normal years it doesn't get planted until after the Spring rains are ended, but this year I have about 30 tomato plants that will be lost. Too soon to know about the peppers yet. We just haven't had much heat yet, so everything is late. I gave most of my tomato transplants away to 3 different families, now I am trying to improve the few I had not planted so I can get a few of them into the garden.....if it ever drys out enough. I have 6 plants on the high side of my garden, so all are not lost.

Paula, I worry about you and Ken and all that high water. Y'all be extra careful! After all these years of fearing that wildfire would burn us all out of our homes, now we are at the other end of the spectrum. It hasn't even taken hail to knock fruit off our plum trees. Every time we have had really high wind and heavy rain together, the ground is covered with fruit. I still hope to get enough plums to make some jelly, but that looks more and more iffy every day. My garden is the same as yours---without raised beds, there simply would be no garden left to produce anything. This week I yanked out the snap peas----the plants, though heavily loaded with peas and still in bloom, were rotting off at the ground, and they are in raised beds. I harvested all I could find as I pulled out each plant and put it on the compost pile. I'm not going to plant anything else in the ground where they were growing until we have had a few days of sunshine to dry out the waterlogged soil in those raised beds. I fear that any seed sowed there now would just rot or wash away anyhow. Robert, What is a sunny day? (grin) I feel like we have become obsessed with mowing and edging the property, precisely because we cannot do it. On the first sunny, dry-ish day we get, Tim will be mowing, and I'll be out there with the string trimmer tidying up the edges, and along fence lines and such. Tim did mow the other day, so at least the grass in the area closest to the house, garden and outbuildings is low, but the roadside and the pastures are high. You know, that snakey sort of high. I can't wait for us to at least be able to mow pathways through the fields. After Tim mowed the other day, he had just parked the riding mower in the garage when gas became pouring out from underneath it. As he was pushing it back out of the garage, I was running to the house to grab cat litter to absorb the spilled gasoline. He eventually found a hose loose and then two parts on the ground that surely must have had something to do with the loose hose, which I assume was a fuel line. So, before he can mow again, he'll have to fix the mower again. It is always something, isn't it? We've never had to work so hard just to mow the grass. Larry, Thanks for the laugh! You always say something that puts a smile on my face. I like the idea of a boat delivered by a drone. Yesterday when I heard the UPS truck coming down the road (you can hear it from a long way off once you are used to what it sounds like) I went down the driveway to meet the driver down at the road. I wouldn't have wanted for him to bring that big old truck up our flooded driveway as he might have gotten stuck in the mud. Has anyone here been counting days and nights of rain? Is anyone approaching 40 days and 40 nights? It might be time to start building an ark, and if I was building that ark, it would have two sections---one for two of each kind of animal and the other for two of each kind of plant. Oh, who am I kidding? It would have a third section for 100 tomato plants. Dawn