Cloudy, with a chance of...

I was standing at the kitchen counter making the girlies' dinner last night, listening to the torrential rain drumming on the roof of our house. We've had some doozie storms around these parts over the past week-or-so... Complete with thunder and lightning and small tornadoes touching down.

I've had terrible migraine headaches, just to "top off" the Wildly Fluctuating Air Pressure Experience. Last night was no exception-- and the kicker was, I couldn't take any hefty codeine-laced prescription medication, because I had to drive my girlies up north to the theatre, for the dress rehearsal of their ballet recital.

And so, there I stood, head throbbing, and not thinking too much about the incredible noise the rain was making, two floors above me, on the roof of my house.

Until, that is, Wee Three suddenly burst into the room.

"MAMA!!" she shrieked excitedly, and grabbed my hand, which was holding a knife covered in an enormous gob of peanut butter (I was making sandwiches for the road). Peanut butter slorped all over the place, as she dragged me out of the kitchen and down the hallway, towards the big diningroom windows at the front of the house.

"MAMA!! LOOK!!!!!"

We stared outside, and I suddenly realized why the sounds on the roof were so sharp... The menacing dark-grey heavens had opened, and large hail-stones, the size of $1 coins, were pelting down on the lawn, the garden, MY FLOWERS, and the whole, wide world... My heart sank right down into my shoes, because I knew that many of the less-hardy plants in my garden would likely not survive such a storm.

Wee Three, on the other hand, was absolutely enchanted by this strange and completely unexpected change in the weather. Oblivious to my angst, she turned her little shining face up to me, and said, giggling wildly:

"MAMA!! It's raining POLKA-DOTS!!!"