Tuesday, February 10, 2009, started out like any other Tuesday.  I dropped Avery off at school and headed to the studio.  I had a fabulous session with the most precious newborn baby girl Blakely (I’ll have your sneak peek up soon mom & dad!) and then grabbed some lunch and headed home for about an hour before time to pick up the girls.  It was warm, sunny and beautiful out.  While I was at home eating lunch and checking email, it started to get dark out and the storm began to move in.  The severe weather sirens sounded right around the time I needed to leave to pick Lily up from mother’s day out.  I turned on the news and although we had storms in Edmond, it looked like possible tornado activity was in the Yukon area.  I decided to leave and pick up Lily and then go to Avery’s school to check her out early so we could go home and take shelter if needed. 

As I was heading back to our house, the weather began to get worse.  I wasn’t sure if we should pull over and run into a store for shelter or keep forging along and get home.  I decided to try to make it home.  It was scary!  I was actually driving right towards the tornado, but didn’t realize that at the time.  It felt like our car was moving.  I was driving as fast as I could.  We pulled into the neighborhood, everything looked fine.  Turned on our street—things still looked fine—I was driving really fast just trying to get to the house.  Once I got down to the end of our street, I was speechless.   Three homes in our neighborhood were heavily damaged (ours being one of those three).   Many, many other homes have broken windows, roof damage, downed fences, downed trees, etc.  It really is a disaster area in our little section of the neighborhood.  I think we got there literally moments after the tornado passed through.  No one was out.  I didn’t know where to go.  We drove down a street in our neighborhood and saw another neighbor pulling into her garage.  I whipped into her driveway and asked if we could come in her house.  We waited there a few minutes until we were sure the storm had passed.  The girls were really worried about our dogs, so I left them at the neighbors and went down to our house to check on our pets and the damage.  The dogs were all safe, but scared! 

We have a large gaping whole in our roof—about 1/3 of it is missing.  Water was already pouring into our dining room.  I started pushing furniture away from the waterfalls and called my husband.  He rushed home and along with some help from friends, we began moving furniture to the back of the house and covering the furniture we couldn’t move with plastic tarps.  Thankfully, we only have a few things that are damaged.  We are so incredibly blessed.  We have extensive water damage to our home and our currently living in a hotel until our rental home is available in a week.  I’m so ready to get into a house and back to a normal routine again!  Hotel life can be fun for a day or two, but now that it has already been a week (and another week to go), it is beginning to wear on all of us. 

The website was down for almost a week because we host it on our own server which was located in our home.  My husband was able to relocate the server last night and got the website back up and running.  I will begin working on orders and proofing sessions just as soon as I can.  Thank you for being patient with me during this time.  I will be in touch as soon as your orders are in or your proofs are ready for viewing.  In the meantime, if you need to contact me, please feel free to call 820-9517 or email apriljackson@sbcglobal.net 

I was supposed to fly out to Vegas today for WPPI (a huge photography convention that I was really looking forward to), but with the events of last week, I will be staying home.  I’m really disappointed about WPPI, but hopefully I’ll be able to make it next year. 

Thanks so much to all of our wonderful friends that have done so much to help us and have kept us in your thoughts and prayers.  We are so incredibly blessed to have the most amazing friends.  Thank you for everything!

It was so great to see you again!  I hope you have a fabulous day today.  Happy 7th Birthday Miss M!