About an hour ago, at 4:40am, I woke up Matt because our room was shaking and I wanted to know why all of our dresser drawer pulls were rattling. He said, “I think we’re having an earthquake!” I’m mentally prepared for what to do for a tornado (grab babies and Hoochie, go to the basement) and a fire (grab babies and Hoochie, get outside), but not an earthquake! We “rode out” the minor shockwaves and prayed for St. Louis because Matt remembered that the epicenter of Illinois’ inactive fault line was around St. Louis. We got up and checked online but there was no info at all then.
I thought about doing Misty’s “wake to sleep” method where right before your babies wake up, you pick them up in their sleep, jostle them just a bit to reset their sleep cycle, then put them back to bed for added sleeping bliss because I wondered if they would be jostled awake by the rolicking motion of our whole house wiggling! I should have done it, because 20 minutes later, Rissa is crying and frustrated that she is awake. I went ahead and fed them so Matt could try to get more sleep because it’s kind of hard to ask them to keep sleeping for one more hour after they did such a good job for 10 hours since 7pm last night! I popped them back in bed and now, I’m headed back to bed. It’s really hard to fall asleep when you were going to get up in an hour anyway! Ugh, tired day ahead. I hope that’s all it is, because it could be far more devastating than just exhaustion for anyone hurt by the earthquake!
That has to be one rude awakening; especially when it’s so rare in your area. The early news reports are not reporting any injuries or major damages so let’s pray that stays true. I’m glad you’re ok. Maybe you can join the kids at nap time and grab a few zzzs for yourself.
Man, I wish I could join the kids for naptime! The whole room-shaking thing was truly surreal for a Midwesterner like myself. I guess the last one of this magnitude happened 40 years ago, so we should consider ourselves lucky to have experienced it, I suppose. I still can’t decide if the lost sleep was worth the future stories about it, though…. 🙂
From what I saw first thing this morning – might be a few cows tipped over in the South East part of your state. I hope that is the worst thing that happened.
I think they call that a minor adjustment – – for God it might be minor but us poor humans just have to ride it out in Awe!
The earthquake was from the Wabash fault, in SE Illinois, not the New Madrid fault, which is SW of St. Louis and is much more likely than the Wabash to have a big quake (the 1811 New Madrid quake was felt in New York).
Wow, we slept right through the actual quake. I did feel the aftershock at ~10:15, but I didn’t realize what it was until ~30 later. At the time, I just thought, “Why is my chair vibrating when it’s clear that it is not plugged in?”