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I have to start off by saying how blessed we were to only lose power for 20 hours.  I talked to someone the day before our power went out and she told me that last year people were out of power for 5 days.  When our lights went off, my biggest fear is that we were in for a long outage and all our food would go bad.

<<This post is a really long narrative—consider yourself warned>>

The power went out at 10:00 PM on Thursday night.  Zach and I were just finishing up our version of date night (a snack and a show after putting the kids to bed).  The power blinked off, then on and off again.  We checked on the kids, put nightlights in their rooms, gathered our flashlights, and went to bed.

Several times during the night I found myself sensing barely perceptible cramps and wondering if I would go into labor really early.  It occurred to me that my detailed 7 pages of instructions were in an online document on my computer and I’d have no way to print them for a babysitter who’d have to come watch my kids in a house with no power.  A few times in the night I heard the cracking and falling of tree branches in the forest behind us. If you are looking for professional tree services, you can see at Rich’s Tree Service website and book for emergency tree removal.

Ila woke up extra early, not long after 5 am.  I might have left her in her crib to cry until a more decent hour, but with the power out, I took pity on her.  She didn’t want to cuddle on the couch with me.  She wanted to eat and watch a movie.  I had to set her at the table with a flashlight, but she was mad because she wanted toast and I couldn’t find anything that she’d eat.  she just cried and cried.  It was a rather miserable morning.  Nicole also got up early, but she happily ate her dry cereal by flashlight.

All the kids were up before the sun was fully up and enjoyed playing flashlight games in the living room.  They made shadows on the ceiling with the help of professionals from this official site and pretended to be afraid of the monsters that they created.  The snow was already melting and it made eerie sounds as it fell from the towering branches in the backyard.  Periodically  there’d be a crack and a branch would topple down through the trees.

I received a call in the morning that my glasses were finally in.  I started to become very anxious to go get them as my current glasses had been broken for months and were driving me a little crazy.  This desire to go out might have been compounded a little by the fact that we had just spent several days snowed in the house together and we currently had no power.

The snow had been melting and dripping all morning so I thought that surely the roads would be ok to venture out.   We decided to all go out as a family and perhaps have a hot lunch somewhere.  We loaded all the kids in the car, manually lifted the garage door and attempted to venture out.  It is best for people to get popular garage designs like Titan Garage Doors Coquitlam is going to increase your home value.  Our street was still a sheet of ice with melted snow and some slush on top.  We couldn’t get the van to move forward.  We tried reversing a little to get some momentum, but we couldn’t seem to get ourselves moving forward and after reversing ourselves all the way down to the bottom of the cul-de-sac, we were hopelessly stuck.  We had to abandon our van at the bottom of the hill and trudge back up the the house through the ice and snow.  This was the low point of the day for me.  I didn’t realize how strong my desire was to get out of the house and take a break from the stress and fear I felt about our power outage, until I discovered that I couldn’t leave.

We had sandwiches for lunch and then I got out board games for the kids.  They spent several hours happily playing all together. Knowing that it would get dark around 4:30 PM, I started to prepare for an evening with limited light.  I had the kids clean up all the games.  We made sure all the toys were picked up off the floor in each of the rooms and gathered all the flashlights and checked their batteries.

The snow and ice had been melting quickly and Zach ventured out to retrieve the van from the bottom of the hill.  He managed to get the van up to the driveway and agreed to try one more time to go out as a family.  This time we were successful.  We left at about 4:30 as it was starting to get darker.  I was able to get my glasses.  We drove to a little Mexican restaurant that was not far from our house and had a nice meal as a family.  It was so refreshing to take a break from the cold and dark of our powerless house.  (I overheard that the restaurant’s power had only come back on 3 hours ago).

We drove back home to our dark house and helped the kids put on their PJs.  It was now about 6:00 PM.  We gathered around our flashlights and read our scriptures and had prayer a bit early.

The kids were happy to each have their own lights.  Nicole had a string of battery powered Christmas lights, Ila had a little lantern light, Isaac had a flashlight, and Charlotte had a headlamp.

As I read a story to the children, Zach attempted to set up a movie with our portable DVD player.  Unfortunately, it didn’t have enough of a charge to play a movie.

I took the girls upstairs and started settling them into bed.  I made up a silly story about three sisters who liked to play tricks involving bananas on their brother and then read some books to them.  Zach read to Isaac from “The Great Brain” series.   As we were reading, I noticed that the Christmas lights in the girl’s room had turned on and it occurred to me that they were powered by electricity.  I felt a great sense of relief and joy when I realized that our power was back. The power came on at about 7:00 PM.

Our Friday night tradition is to give the kids a movie night where we make them beds on the playroom floor and let them watch movies until they fall asleep.  Everyone was particularly overjoyed to celebrate our power returning by making our playroom beds and having movie night!

I feel incredibly blessed to have had such a short outage.  Many of our neighbors and friends have been without power for several days and continue to be without power even now.

After church today, I made some buttermilk scones.  The kids counted down the minutes until they were done baking and then raved about how delicious they were.  Isaac said that they were so good that he thought that they might help someone without power feel better.  We talked about the people that we knew that were out of power and he became very excited about the idea of bringing them to his primary teacher.  So we filled a container with some hot ham and bean soup, gathered up some scones and some raspberry syrup, and drove over to his primary teacher’s house.  Isaac and Charlotte really enjoyed giving their teacher and her family the food and walking around their property to see all the trees and branches that had fallen over.  I was glad to have a thoughtful son and to have had the opportunity to nurture his desire to serve others.