The Storm and the Aftermath

Here in AZ this week we were hit with a BIG STORM…and not a BIG STORM in our AZ-weather-whimpy opinions, but a true BIG STORM. Lots of rain and lots of wind.

To add to the fun of the BIG STORM our backyard is totally messed up. It drives my poor Civil Engineer crazy.

So after a couple of days of non-stop rain this is what our back patio and yard looked like.

You can’t see it real well, but the water in the pool is way above where it is supposed to be, that is how much rain we had.

There was a tornado watch and warning one night, but thankfully no tornado.

The neighbors across the street lost a pretty big tree.

We don’t usually have water features in our neighborhood, but for now our retention basins are pretty full.

We woke up on Saturday to beautiful blue skies and everything was starting to dry out. Including the backyard.

There are still puddles that will be around for awhile.

The water level is almost back to normal in the pool, but there was still a lot of debris that needed cleaned out of it.

I am just glad that with all the wind we had there wasn’t any damage to either one of our shade sails.

But by Saturday everyone had been cooped up way too long. The kids have had rainy day schedule at school for most of the week so they really needed to get out and run. Since the weather was so nice Big Daddy we decided to put the clean-up on hold and took the kiddos to go play at the parks in the neighborhood.

At our first stop we were surprised to see the water was dropping pretty quickly.

As we were headed to one of the other parks I realized I hadn’t combed LaLa’s hair since Thursday…it did look really cute at one time.

We saw more damage on our way.

The sky was so pretty with white fluffy clouds.

The kiddos had lots of fun.

We finally headed to the third park.

This is a view of one of our new neighborhood ponds.

Then I noticed that these big black clouds were moving in. It kind of looks like the black cloud is going to eat the white, fluffy cloud. There were a few drops of rain, but that was it.

It was the perfect day.

 

At one of the parks I took frame-by-frame pictures of the kiddos coming down the slide as a train. I wasn’t able to get all of them together in one shot so I made it into a little movie. If I knew what I was doing I could have added some music or something, but I don’t so I didn’t.