Earthquake

Lee got up this morning to feed Landon about 4:30. I got up to use the bathroom and just as I laid back down the bed started shaking. We have a punching bag hanging in the basement underneath our room and I could hear it swinging. My first thought was why in the world is Lee punching this early in the morning? But I realized that it was swinging pretty hard. Then I noticed the windows rattling, and since our bed is on wood floors, it was sliding away from the wall. That’s when I got nervous. I hopped out of bed and met Lee in the door jamb of our room. He handed me Landon and went to look out the window. By this time the shaking had stopped. We kept watching our neighbor’s houses to see if anyone turned their lights on, but no one seemed to be awake. We turned on the TV and no one was talking about it, so we started to think we were either crazy or something was seriously wrong with our furnace.

Finally, a little before 5, they came on and confirmed that there had been a 5.4 (now it’s a 5.2) earthquake 127 miles east of us! That’s crazy. I have a new respect for the power of earthquakes. Not that I didn’t respect it before, I just didn’t think about it. Anyway, it was kind of comical. It really scared us, Lee in particular. After he handed me Landon, he changed his clothes and got all dressed. For what, it’s hard to say. He looked like he was ready to go into hand to hand combat with Mother Nature. When we finally crawled back in bed we were both laughing – mostly at Lee. “I feel invicible!” he said. Then, of course, we came up with a better course of action should we ever experience a more powerful earthquake. In case you’re wondering, Lee will grab the little ones and I’ll grab Sloan. Likely we’ll never have to deal with that, but it’s nice to feel prepared.

Luckily Sloan didn’t really notice it. He did come out of his room and asked what it was, then went back to sleep pretty quickly. This morning we were talking about it and he remembered seeing this movie about earthquakes and volcanoes (it’s that really ridiculous Tommy Lee Jones, Anne Heche movie set in California). To dispel any fears, we talked about how God created the earth to cry out to Him and praise Him and how the rocks must have been feeling full of praise so they had to clap together in joy. That seemed to satisfy him. So there you have it. We experienced the midwest earthquake. Crazy!

update: we just had an aftershock that we totally felt! I was in the basement doing laundry and noticed the clothes shaking. Sloan was upstairs watching a movie and starting yelling that the earth was shaking again. It wasn’t as strong as the first one, but we could feel it. I clicked over to the news and they confirmed that we’d just experienced a pretty noticable shake, likely related to this mornings! This is wild!