When my youngest was about 10 months old, lightning hit the roof above his head while he was sleeping in his crib at 5 a.m. We heard it and I ran upstairs, and he was still asleep. The older boys woke up and I grabbed the baby and put him in bed with the eldest while hubby ran outside to check. He came back in all panicked thinking the baby must have been hurt.

It blew a hole in the roof about the size of a basketball, scorched the wiring, blew most of the siding off the side of the house, and burnt up every piece of electronics that was hooked up anywhere. (Our computers, the dictation equipment owned by the podiatrist I worked for, the TVs--everything.)

The sound was so loud that three of the neighbor's burglar alarms went off, and we could hear them all wailing away. It's a sound I will never forget, I'll tell you that. Strangely, we never lost power.

We called 911 because of the burning smell--luckily we lived not 2 blocks away from the fire station. There was no fire. Every fireman that came through said it was a good thing we called because there was a well-publisized fire the week before where people died, and it was because they didn't call 911 as soon as the lightning struck.

Baby Will slept through it ALL. Just like his mother slept through a tornado when she was 4.

Karen