Howdy Lee,

Thanks for the prayers - God has been most gracious!

I agree that kids can be greatly affected by fire. They have talked about it a fair bit, but it's been pretty matter-of-fact. I think in our case a few circumstances helped out, a big one being that the smoke alarms hadn't started going off yet when we discovered the fire, so there wasn't the adrenaline rush of "alarm!". It was just Mom in my "to be obeyed" voice saying to get up now, get out the front door and stay on the front porch. Also, we only sat on the front porch for about five minutes, and we couldn't see the garage directly from there (although it lit up the yard like daytime). When Roy* picked us up from the front porch, we got in his car, and then pulled back out on the road. From there, we were in a safe place watching the fire, and it wasn't a direct threat to us personally. So it wasn't nearly as "personal" as it could have been. That said, had our house been wood frame rather than stone, I have doubts as to whether or not I'd be sitting here telling you about it

I thought about putting in our "Godzilla eating the cars" picture that we sent to the insurance company, but I think I'll stick with pix of the rebuilding process. They'll be more encouraging If anyone wants to see pix of the entire process, including post-blaze, let me know.

ttfn,
Sherry

notes: *Roy is a fellow who saw the blaze from the cross-road a half mile away on his way to work, and turned down our road to see if he could help. He drove right up in the yard and picked us up from the front porch. This was about 3:30 in the morning. He then pulled up to the sheriff's car so we could give him details, and then took us right to the hotel in Bad Axe and got us checked in. We'd never met him before, and never found out his last name, but God bless him!

The "Godzilla" picture shows the vehicles post-blaze, and there is one part of a post with a bit of siding still attached, and the angle of the shot makes it look like Godzilla hovering over Bill's car. That's the one we sent to our car insurance company )