lightning strikes

Last Saturday, early in the morning hours…3:40 a.m., we had a large storm going through Rogers. The thunder was some of the loudest thunder that I’ve heard. All of a sudden we heard a really loud pop. It sounded like all of the windows in our house had busted. Neal and I SPRUNG out of bed and had adrenaline pumping through our bodies. Many of the appliances had gone off but we noticed that the ac was still pumping, the oven and microwave were blinking and the fridge was still running. We decided to go upstairs to make sure the girls were okay, check on the power up there and see if we could get the power downstairs working by flipping the breakers (which is located in the attic space in Reese’s room).


We went into Ella’s room and her fan was off but she was butt in the air sound asleep, not phased a bit. We then walked into Reese’s room. Neal headed to the attic space and I walked over to Reese. She was standing up and had been completely silent. As soon as she saw me she began sobbing and she was shaking so hard and her heart was beating so fast. I felt so bad for her. I got her out of her crib and laid with her in her big girl bed (she still refuses to sleep in her big girl bed but we are going to tear down the crib soon and force the issue). When Neal finished with the breaker box everything seemed to come back on, as far as we could tell without testing things. Reese was so scared that we decided to let her sleep with us, for the first time ever. It took her about an hour to go back to sleep. Ella’s monitor wasn’t working so I really couldn’t sleep out of fear that she would need me and I wouldn’t hear her. Around 6:45 I moved up to the bonus room to try to sleep and cracked Ella’s door so that I would hear her once she woke up. Reese woke up soon after I left the bed and noticed I was gone so she made Neal take her to find me.

When they got up to the bonus room we tried to turn on the 4 month old 60” television to realize that it had been fried. We went on to find that both baby monitors, all 3 cable boxes, the sound transmitter (machine that carries the tv, radio or ipod over the ceiling speakers), DVD players, alarm system, sprinkler system, iphone charger, router and modem were all fried & likely the ceiling speakers but that isn’t confirmed yet. Reese’s favorite movie, Toy Story, is also stuck in the DVD player and we lost our recording on the cable box of her other favorite movie, Tangled.

When Cox came out they verified that the jolt came in through the cable. He showed us the small metal box that had been turned black, which is located in Reese’s closet. He said we were lucky that it had not started a fire. He said that what we heard from downstairs was much, much louder in her room and that it probably also made a very bright light. Poor girl was petrified for good reason.

I am so thankful that this wasn’t worse than it was. We have an electrician coming out to ensure proper grounding and wiring but I am going to be a bit fearful every time we have a storm that comes through for a while. Reese may be in our room during bad lightning storms in the future.