It's raining, it's pouring, Baby Bear is snoring....

so far, Baby Bear takes after her parents. Both of us are fairly heavy sleepers. However, now that I have a little one, I find I don't sleep quite as soundly as I used to.

Our sole TV is upstairs... not the part of the house you should be in during T-storm warnings and tornado watches. Nights like tonight make me wish we had a basement, preferably finished. Dad had finished the basement of our first house in MI. I was a toddler when we transplanted to the midwest from the east coast. Our house was a simple 3 bedroom 1 1/2 bath ranch, but with the basement it seemed huge. There were plenty of nooks and crannies and closets in which to play hide and seek. The house was situated on a hill, and a long, narrow deck ran most of the length of the back of the house. Both the dining area and my parents' bedroom had sliding glass doors out to the deck. Nights like tonight, we would watch the storms from my parents' bedroom. If a tornado warning went into effect, to the basement we went. During the winter months, we spent many a snow/ice storm around the iron wood-burning stove surrounded by a brick hearth. And then there was the old brown leather lazy boy, or maybe it was vinyl that was supposed to look like leather. We would climb on that and tip it backward the way Baby Bear climbs on her toddler chair. Except it was a little more difficult to move around... we couldn't just toss it.

Our next house was a little larger, but to get to the laundry room (basement), mom had to go down two flights of steps instead of just one. The basement was still a work-in progress when we moved... it had a storage area, the utility area, and what was to eventually become a bedroom. It never quite got finished. But when the tornado warnings came, guess where we huddled with our sleeping bags, flashlights, and pillows? Yep, that unfinished basement... the closet of the craft area/bedroom. And then there was the time the neighbor's "pet" fox got loose, but we didn't know it was their pet, and then the news guy ended up filming the pop-up hailstorm from our back deck and doing a story on a seemingly tame, stray fox from our backyard. The fox belonged to the scary neighbors, the ones who blasted heavy metal and I truly thought were members of a strang occult. (Keep in mind the church we went to at the time taught that singers like Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith, those so-called "contemporary Christian musicians", were misguided heathens who were really going straight to hell with their music. And culottes were somehow more modest than pants for playing sports or on the playground... though in reality, the boys could see UP them if they tried, so they were actually less modest than pants. Thank God our parents got us out of that church. Though the funny thing is, the time spent in THAT group prepared me for understanding the mindset of my future husband's grandparents. Well, a little better understanding, anyway.) Anyway, back to the neighbors... they were one of 2 homes in the small subdivision that I remember we NEVER went to for trick-or-treating. If they weren't nice to us most of the time, and we suspected them of keep pets for strange reasons, why would we want to trick-or-treat there? And the man who mowed the lawn in his speedo at the other place was just plain gross.

Ah, the memories. I don't think the thought that I would be laying in my bed as an adult, remembering thunder storms past ever really occured to me as a child. I certainly didn't think my random mind would wander to culotte-wearing churches, fox-hostage-keeping neighbors, or speedo-wearing middle-aged men. UGh.

I want my hubby to come home. I've gone from having my usual weird dreams to really strange flashbacks in his absence.

All is quiet through the baby monitor. Good night, friends.