The day our trampoline rolled away

Caroline is always complaining that she's the only one that never has a friend over. I don't have some kind of rotation schedule it's just that the other girls are always on the phone planning stuff with their friends and Caroline never thinks of it until she's the one being left out after school. So one morning last week we got up and I happened to think of calling her best friend to see if she could ride the bus home to our house. They got off the bus and spent the first half hour jumping. Then they came in for a belated afterschool snack. While we were working on that we heard faint sirens going off outside. It sounded something like a warning siren and Kennon became concerned, of course, while I continued to run around cleaning etc. About 2 minutes after that

the sky suddenly darkened and the power went out. Kennon ran over to the window to check out the current conditions and happened to see our trampoline taking a violent roll down our hill. She was screaming for me to get out there and save it (The kids paid for half of it)  . . while I was screaming for everyone to get into the basement in case of . .  I don't know. . .Tornado?? 

I hadn't bothered to tune into the message that was being broadcast via the siren and there had been a tornado an hour away the week before. So we all ran into the basement which was now completely pitch black at 4:30 in the afternoon. I found candles and we sat in the room with no windows for about an hour all the while reassuring Caroline's best friend that we were just being cautious and No, her parents weren't dead. My cell phone doesn't get reception at our home usually so we really felt stranded and out of the loop. Finally the hour passed and I ventured out and was smart enough to get into the car and listen to the radio because we had been unable to find any batteries of course to run any inside. I listened to several news broadcast and finally determined that it was safe now since no one said anything about a tornado a coming. Then I drove the best friend home, taking necessary detours to avoid the power line wire that was strung out across the road the trampoline just rolled over.  As she got out of the car she turned to Caroline and said, "Caroline, I am never coming to your house again!" 

Which I thought was hardly fair. To pin the storm and power outage on a 7 year old. We carried the trampoline back up the hill and it was mostly intact. Or I guess it is because we are still jumping on it. We had no power or water until the next morning and my two oldest daughters seriously couldn't handle it. I kept trying to get them to just relax like we were camping, but they thought it was such a trial. Even though we drove downtown, picked up pizza and then hung out and had a picnic in the dark just the seven of us. Kids these days.