It has been raining for weeks now. Like, storms, tornados, crazy wind. Not a single day has gone by that it hasn't at least drizzled at some point in the day. And I'm serious when I say weeks. It started about the beginning of May. This first set of pictures was taken on Mother's Day. We had big storms all weekend. It poured all day for days on end. Highway 75 had closed in Van Alstyne because of 3 feet of standing water on the highway and access roads. Entire fields of crops along 75 were huge lakes. Sunday morning, we were an hour late to Mother's Day brunch at Kristen's because a huge storm had blown through around 8am. A tornado had touched down in the metorplex and Frisco had gotten sirens around 7am. We made it to brunch and it rained all day. We headed home after lunch and we were just hanging out for the day. Suddenly, we were getting storm warnings and it looked like a major storm was heading this way around 3pm. It was pointed more towards Sherman but turned towards east Denison about 15 minutes before it was supposed to hit. Cody still didn't believe it but I was starting to get worried. Our cable went out so we were listening to the emergency radio and it was pretty nasty out. Right as Cody was heading outside to get a closer look (!!!) when our neighbor Morgan Helm texted that the news just said it was hitting Single Tree Rd, which is about 100 yards away from us. It was a rough few minutes of anxiety. It hit about 5 minutes later, but thankfully it hit about 3 miles down our road. We didn't have any damage, and the main damage from the tornado was just trees ripped up and thrown around. When we went to look around later, you could see exact spots where the tornado skipped around the ground. 3 foot in diameter trees were just pulled straight out of the ground. Someone got a picture of the tornado from Sherman and I honestly can't believe it was so big. It was insane but we were seriously lucky. We did get so much rain that our pond was now almost 5 times bigger than normal. It was overflowing on all sides and was bigger than I could have ever imagined. The creek was a rushing river and had come up and over the creek bank. It ended up almost 20 feet across instead of the normal 5 feet across.
After a few more weeks of rain, Texas started flooding. Lake Texoma was gaining about a foot a day. They opened the flood gates to try to keep it from going over the spillway. But even with the dam open, it was only going out half as much as it was coming in. We kept hearing reports of lakes flooding the close neighborhoods. We went to look at the dam and spillway on Saturday morning of the last week of May. It was about a foot from going over and ended up going over the spillway on Sunday evening. The river that came out of it is huge and rushing. It flooded the road going to the lake and cut off access from the Texas side. There were even men who kayaked down the lake, over the spillway, across the road and down the river. It was a ton of water! Sadly, there was another tornado scare on Memorial Day while we were in Frisco for Grayson's birthday. This time it hit about 6 miles away and didn't have too much damage. Sadly, over Memorial Day weekend, the Blanco River down south of Austin flooded and the town of Wimberly was pretty devastated. It was so sad and heartbreaking. We are thankful for the rain because it was much needed but we pray for those affected by all the flooding.
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