Tonights Forcast: Partly darn with a chance of WTF!!

So last night Jen and I head for bed around 11:00. We notice the sky flashing with lightning and hear a few low rumbles of thunder. As we were watching "King of the Hill" and drifting off to sleep we notice the lightning get brighter and more often and the thunder getting louder. The boys have slept through thunderstorms before so I wasn't that concerned that it would bother them, but then a few lightning strikes came real close to the house and the thunder was pretty loud.....It first started with Andrew waking up crying, darn, but I looked in at William and he was sawing logs, cool. So we decided we might as well take Andrew into our bedroom since the chance of getting him back down to sleep would be pretty slim until the storm passed. Just our luck a few rumbles later William wakes up crying and screaming, sh**. So we are all sitting on our bed watching the local TV doing stories on the storm and keeping the boys entertained. We got hit pretty hard with rain and wind. The umbrella on the back deck blew out of the table so I ran downstairs and stuck my nose outside just far enough to collapse the umbrella so it wouldn't fly away and got soaked. After watching Letterman and the beginning of Ferguson at 1:00am I decide that the storm has pretty much passed and the thunder wasn't as loud. I put William to bed relatively easy and he falls asleep after 5 or 10 minutes. Andrew is another story. Jen has to deal with him and he is AWAKE and wired for some reason so he immediately goes into full bore crying and screaming (which William stays asleep for thank God). So Jen is in Andrews room trying to calm him down and I hear the sump pump in the basement running and running and running. I decide that I better go down and check it out since I don't really trust that sump pump. (the damn thing ran during the drought conditions of last week for some reason). As I hit the basement floor off the stairs I feel -squish- (Son of a B****) and then I get to the door of the furnace room and -squish- (F***). I open the door to see sump pit overflowing with about 1/4 inch of water in the furnace room. Thank God the sump was working, but there was too much water coming too fast for it to handle it. For what I can see most of the water is contained in this room with a few spots in the carpet getting wet and along the walls of the furnace room. I quickly start pulling things out of the room. Lucky for me there wasn't anything in the room in cardboard except the box for the battery backup that I have yet to install. (just became a priority). Good thing that I didn't get around to my project of putting a bunch of stuff under the stairs like I was planning. After getting all of the stuff to the dry area of the basement I start taking buckets of water from the sump pit upstairs and dumping it in the shower drain. I am not sure I was doing any good, but I didn't know what else to do. It seemed that after an hour the water level in the pit was getting lower. I notice more flashes of lightning and go upstairs to see if I can find a radar on the TV. Nope. I guess they check-out at midnight at the local stations. Lucky for me the second storm never hit. About 2:30 the sump was able to catch up to the water coming in and I felt safe enough to go upstairs to bed. I layed there until after 3:00 listening for it to go on and then turn off since I was still paranoid, but exhaustion got the better part of me and I fell asleep. Waking up at 7:00 was fun this morning, but I made it. Now just the sound of fans downstairs trying to dry up the carpet. Overall I would have been really FUBAR'd if the sump went totally out and nothing got damaged so I was petty fortunate.