Eventful Night!

Wow, what a night. Last night was the first time in my ten years of having kids that I really felt scared for my children's lives. Kind of wierd, I know but when you are home alone on the top level of your house and storms come through in the middle of the night, that is how you feel. Last night tornado warnings were in the area, we were in the basement most of the evening, with not much actually happening. About 10:30 I woke my sleeping kids and brought them to their bedrooms, as they had fallen asleep in the basement. I decided to sleep with my TV on, as I thought that way if any more severe storms came, I would have some warning. Well I just happened to wake at about 2:00 am and the weather was on, we were definitely in a severe thunderstorm but the weather man said that winds were not reaching terrible damaging speeds. I remember hearing that the worst was in Lee's Summit (about 20 miles to the south) and Liberty was clocking 58 MPH winds. Just then the lights went out and it was raining. I went to Cole's room to shut his window, when all of a sudden I heard the terrible sound of a train (you know they always say that distinct sound when a tornado hits). I tell Cole to start heading downstairs and run to MErrick's room (in the dark with no flashlight) and scoop her off the floor (as she was on the floor for some reason). We run downstairs in the basement and crouch in our storage room. Tom calls me from work just as we hit the basement asking where we were-I always tell him he has to call me if anything happens in the night as I am so afraid I won't know it. We stayed in the storage room for a good 20 minutes-I just didn't want to take the chance of leaving my kids to check things out. Of course I have no radio, no flashlight, only my cell phone lighting our way. I called Tom to check to see if it was clear-he said yes-so I put my kids in the bed in the guest room (in the basement) and went upstairs to look around. I saw my neighbors out with flashlights so I went over to see if they were ok. Turns out their air conditioner was blowing around and they were trying to figure out if it was going to be an issue with the electricity. AFter looking around, I headed back downstairs with the kids and the three of us tried to sleep in our queen bed-needless to say, only Merrick got to sleep for long as she was the only one snoring most of the night. I was mad at myself for not having the kids sleep in the basement for the entire night, but to be honest, i wanted everyone getting a good night sleep before we leave today for St. Louis, so now we haven't slept well. Anyway, about 6:30 I came up stairs-as helicopters were flying around-I knew we must have had some good damage. The neighborhood about a mile south of me has houses off foundations, roofs off, windows out, etc. Our neighborhood had a lot of roof damage, siding damage, and swing sets/trampolines ruined. The house two doors down from mine which is the exact same type of house as mine has the siding off one whole side. My next door neighbor to one side has siding damage and her deck is hanging off her house. On the other side, my neighbor's lattice around her deck was destroyed. We just had lattice damage (from around our deck) and a few buckled shingles. All in all nothing major and we were safe. They are saying it was just straight line winds or a microburst-but no tornado. Winds reached speeds of 80 something- Whatever it was it just made for one eventful night. Hope others in the KC area are safe!