Oh what a night!

Last night we were downstairs about 10 pm when we heard this really loud sound coming from outside. It had been sprinkling up to this point, but not very hard rain, so it was suprising to look out the window and see huge balls of ice falling from the sky. The hail probably only lasted 5-10 minutes, but it managed to knock out the power, destroy our swing canopy, knock out a couple of big branches out of our tree, destroy my flowers and cover the yard, driveway and deck in leaves. At the time, Chris and I were most worried about our basement flooding as we have had some trouble with that lately, but thankfully that didn't happen. We woke up this morning to no electricity and a big mess. All plans were put on hold today to wait out the power outage and clean up the mess. We definitely didn't have as much damage as some people and we are very glad that all the damage was only cosmetic and nothing that needs immediate repair. The power came back on late this morning and we worked together and were able to get the majority of it cleaned up in about 2 hours. I have never been in a hail storm this bad before. Just hearing the hail hit the house was scary, I honestly thought it might break a few windows or screens or something. Luckily the boys slept through the whole ordeal!