Pix It Mommy!

Last night I woke up rather suddenly to find that the power had gone off. Turns out the power was off on our whole street. It was a very windy night. I imagine that I tree limb must have fallen on a power line. It didn’t take long for it to get quite cold in the house. I called the power company to report the outage. The recording told me to dial my 10 digit telephone number to access my account. The recording then told me that there was no record of an account with that number! Shocked, I tried calling again with the same results. I’ve done this whole process before during previous powers outages and it’s worked fine. I guess we just don’t exist any more.

So I crawled back into my warm bed and tried to go back to sleep. No luck, Joel started crying. I was not surprised to find him quite cold and quite scared. All the kid’s night lights were out and it’s very, very dark upstairs in our house. I decided to bring Joel down to sleep in my bed. This is a very unusual thing for us because Dan and I NEVER let the kids sleep with us. Not even when they’re sick. I can only recall a handful of occasions when one of our kids was SO sick that there was no other option but to let them stay the night in our bed. Anyway, as expected, Joel tossed and turned and in general made sleeping impossible. After awhile I got quite tired of dealing with that and put him back in his own bed. But not before putting a sweater on over his pajamas and giving him an extra blanket. He was a good sport and went right back to sleep. Then I went back to bed too.

I awoke with a jolt again realizing that it was morning and the sun was already shining! In other words, it was late! I checked my watch to find that it was already 8:15! It was almost time for Amy to catch her bus! At least the power came back on during the night and we weren’t all freezing. Amy missed her bus and I had to drive her to school myself. I am feeling quite tired and very fuzzy in the brain.

So yes, I love electricity. As I was lying in bed last night while the power was out, I kept thinking what would happen to us if the power was out for an extended period of time….hours, days, even weeks?! I thought about people long ago before electricity. They managed to keep warm enough in the winter. Though probably not as warm as I’m accustomed to. But people long ago had fire places and wood burning stoves in their homes to keep warm. We have nothing like that here! I don’t know what we’d do to keep warm long term with no electricity. Not to mention how we’d even cook our food. Makes me feel very glad that there is a fire place in our new house. At least we’ll have that in an emergency.

I’m so glad our power is back on. I really don’t like the cold. Winter is really awful. I think that I wouldn’t mind winter so much if I didn’t have young children. It is so challenging to keep little children warm during the winter months. They don’t keep their blankets on during the night and they never want to wear their hats and gloves. Their little hands and feet are more susceptible to freezing than mine. And kids just can’t run outside and play for as long as they want to or need to when it’s freezing outside. Ah well…such is life.

This too shall pass. And then there’s spring!