2017 has been a rollercoaster year so far. (And I know I’m not the only one who’s experienced this.)

Starting out, I had so many hopes and expectations for what I planned to accomplish. Reality crushed some of those expectations, which has been frustrating and a royal pain at times, but I’ve still managed to write around the chaos.

I just haven’t been good about updating my blog. 😛 Need to do a better job of prioritizing.

January wasn’t too bad; managed to get a good chunk of writing in around my son’s sleep schedule. (Actually, now that I think about it, January was the least eventful month we’ve had so far this year, and the month in which I wrote the most.)

The first half of February also went pretty well. My son finally started taking naps (praise God) and I started to be able to get some things done. (I’m now taking care of the day-to-day bookwork for the addiction ministry my husband works for.)

Then the disc in my husband’s back re-herniated. After days of going around and around with insurance, we finally got everything straightened out and he was able to go the ER and be admitted to the hospital. He ended up having surgery a couple of days later and then I brought him home.

Not the way I thought February would go at all, but we’re very grateful he was finally able to get the surgery he needed. Plus, since we had our son with us, it meant we got a lot of visits from lovely nurses who’d heard there was a baby on the floor. 🙂

The fun didn’t stop there. March 1, three days after my husband’s surgery, a series of severe storms came through our area and produced several tornadoes. My husband slept through the first round of storms in the middle of the night—though I woke him up long enough at one point for him to kiss me and tell me everything would be fine before he went right back to sleep. LOL. He was right though—everything was fine through that storm.

The second round of storms wasn’t supposed to arrive until around mid-morning, so I figured it was safe to go to bed.

At 6:15 am, I sat bolt upright in bed. It took me a second to realize the power was off and that the reason I could see anything was because of all the lightning outside. That was when I heard a terrible, rushing, roaring sound that seemed on the verge of coming right through our bedroom window.

That’s the first time I’ve ever heard a tornado in real life. I’ve seen movies and watched youtube videos and weather channel footage, but I’d never actually experienced it myself. I can see why people liken the sound to an oncoming train. That was probably the scariest thing I’ve ever lived through.

At any rate, I woke my husband up and he jumped out of bed on my side because he thought the tornado was coming through the house too. I grabbed my glasses and ran to get our son and the three of us hurried downstairs to the bathroom. (Our house is built into the side of a hill, so that was the safest place to go.) The house was shaking and we could hear debris being whipped against it.

After a few minutes that felt like a small eternity, the tornado passed and my husband ventured upstairs to peek out the front door, even though we were still under a tornado warning. It was still dark and pouring rain, with lots of thunder and lightning, so he couldn’t see much, but he came back down to tell me it looked like part of a tree was on top of my car.

It ended up being more than that. 😛

The tornado passed along a ridge about a hundred feet from our house, uprooting some trees and snapping others in half. One of those trees was a giant hickory that leaned a little toward the house…and it fell on top of both our cars, crushing them. The tornado then curved around and dropped more trees and power lines on our driveway, so in order to get out afterwards, we had to climb up a wooded hill to get to the road.

This is what our cars looked like:

I’m grateful though, because if the tree had been ten feet taller, it would have smashed through our living room. Other than some gutter damage, and a tree the tornado knocked down on top of a new peacock pen my husband was nearly finished building, the cars were our only major material loss. Nobody was hurt.

Cue a bunch of storm cleanup, local electric company crews working tirelessly to repair the damage and restore power, and dealing with insurance companies. We were able to pay for most of a replacement for my car thanks to insurance, but not my husband’s. A couple of days later, we got a call from a pastor friend of ours, who wanted to give us a vehicle he and his wife could no longer use because it had more issues than they wanted to deal with and she was getting ready to have a baby. We’re still driving that vehicle. 🙂 God is good.

The rest of March was a breeze compared to that. Even our son cutting teeth. 😛

April kicked off another rollercoaster. The beginning of the month, I found out I’m expecting again. That was a bit of a surprise…we’d planned to wait a while longer. Three days after that, we ended up with emergency custody of my stepdaughter, which, after six weeks of court hearings, CPS meetings, and attorney meetings, ended up becoming full custody. That was a transition on all our parts, but it’s worked out really well.

In the midst of all that, my family was getting ready for my youngest sister’s wedding in June. Post-wedding, things calmed down a bit. Aside from my son cutting more teeth off and on, which resulted in a grouchy little guy who didn’t want to sleep and needed a lot of attention. 😛 I didn’t get a lot done those days, but I did get to spend a lot of time with a little boy who won’t be little forever.

Needless to say, in terms of project priority, The Stone General and everything else floating around in my head have taken a backseat to Freedom’s Children. That’s the story that needs to be published next.

I’m doing better at rolling with the punches and putting things in perspective. (My husband is good at helping me do that.) I may not have made as much progress on FC as I would have liked the first half of 2017, but I still got a significant chunk of the story written. That’s still progress—and I’ll take it. 🙂

More on Freedom’s Children in the next post.