What the Hail? April 2016

I thought that this year's crazy storm came and went in late December when a tornado ripped through a nearby town and completely destroyed some homes and ripped roofs off of others. But we had a crazy April too. We had a storm one evening where it sounded like sheets of ice were falling onto our house. And that's basically what was happening. I've never heard anything like it. Jake and I ran upstairs screaming at each other (because we couldn't hear otherwise) to get the children. We scooped them out of bed and ran downstairs to get into our storm closet. Poor kids. But I wasn't going to chance it with what we'd seen and heard about from December's storms. They were so good. And it was scary outside. By the time it all passed, we were able to easily put everyone back to bed and witness the huge pile of hail that had poured off our roof onto our back porch. It was crazy. By the time it all melted, there was quite the pile of roof composite that had come with it. A floodlight had been shattered, our drain pipes were all dented, and one side of our fenced had been beaten up pretty badly. Jake's car was outside at the time, (and his face was not happy when I reminded that it was sitting at just the right angle behind the low hill next to us, or something. Regardless, I was thankful not to have more hail damage. As it is, we've got to get a portion of our roof replaced once the storm season is over.
A very short time later, we were hit with another hail storm and very glad that we hadn't yet fixed our roof from the first one. These hail stones were much bigger. Oddly enough, they didn't do as much damage. Although the stones were huge (at least golf ball size), they had air pockets in them so the density didn't hit like it could have. The story was very different in other areas around us, however. We had friends with chunks of their roof on the ground or in their pool. In the nearby city of Wylie, they had baseball sized, solid ice hail stones. These stones were not only crashing through windows, they went straight through roofs. Our friends who moved there recently had twenty holes in their roof where hail slammed straight through. The community moved to see what they could do to help people get situated until things could get straightened out. The rain wasn't finished over the next couple of weeks, so some of these homes had tarps on the roof and windows boarded up to keep their homes from further damage. The cars outside at the time there were done for.
These stones were from the second storm. We have a video of our children jumping on the trampoline with the hail.