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Allison continues to amaze us with all her talking. Now, her speech still has lots of work, but she is shocking us by putting 5-7 words together. The other day she said something like "my take off shoes before get in bed". The bad part about all the talking is when we don't understand her, which is a regular occurrence every few minutes :) Many times it leads into a screaming/crying match. Sometimes we have to leave the room, other times we just ask her for a hug and change the subject.

On the sleep front - she is great about going to be about 8pm. We don't have any issues with her getting into bed and staying there. I think we've only had one peepee accident in the last month. Lately she's been waking us up between 2-4am to tell us she has to go peepee. If it's after 4am though she's ready to get up for the day. I'd say on average she gets 8.5-9 hours of sleep at night with a 2 hour nap at daycare. I'm so jealous of my other friends kids who are sleeping longer. With Allison getting up between 4:30 and 5:30 everyday that means I sleep from 6-7.5 hours which is not enough. A few times I've worked with her to tell her to play in her room while mommy goes back to bed but that may last 10 minutes. She's still has trouble getting on /off the toilet by herself unless she takes her pants off all the way, but then she can't get them back on by herself. Ugh, always something. I'm seriously in awe of mothers that have multiple children and can get them out of the door ontime everyday to go to work.

Last week the National Weather Service issued 29 tornado warnings in my county (Madison/Huntsville, Alabama) and 92 for North Alabama. But Wednesday, April 27 was the crazy day that 21 hit the state, 100 tornados hit the southern US, killing 356 and destroying so many homes.

An EF5 with max winds at 205 MPH was just a few miles northwest from my house and within blocks of a few friends houses. Another EF1 tornado was just to the southwest of us. Power was knocked out to the major transmission lines and caused huge problems leading to power being out for 5 days for us and most of north Alabama. I feel lucky that we only had minor damage (fence and siding, maybe some roof shingles) and that I don’t have any close friends with huge damage. Though a mom I know through daycare lost her house, but the family is ok.

Here is a map of the tornado paths (click for larger version w/text description):



After the power went out Wednesday and was not on Thursday we were hearing reports that it could be one week to 10 days before it was restored. (And here I'll say thanks for Verizon for pretty good cell coverage on our smart phones) Jeff had plans to go to his parents house in Mississippi to attends a friends wedding and have a guys weekend, but I decided Allison and I would crash it :) If I had an option to avoid a week without power with a toddler ofcourse I was taking it. And ofcourse Mimi and Pawpaw were excited to see Allison and hear her sing ‘tinkle tinkle little star’ in person.

So we got back into town on Monday just hours after our power was back on, and the internet came back Tuesday. Today is Thursday and Jeff is back at work but I am not. Seems Marshall Space Flight Center will be one of the last businesses to get power. I’ve been told I have to flex out the missed work time or take vacation or leave-with-out-pay. Boo. I knew I should have worked harder to convince Jeff to skip the wedding and us just go to the beach.