Snowstorms and Power Outages

This past weekend was certainly an interesting one!  It all started with snow falling on Saturday morning that we expected to be just a light dusting.  However, the snow just kept coming and it was wet and heavy!  I had my day nicely planned out with all the errands I wanted to do and the hubby had plans of Krav Maga training but that all changed when he went to leave for training and couldn't even drive because of the snow.  So instead of Krav Maga he spent the day snow plowing and we spent the day indoors watching Christmas movies!

The hubby was set to volunteer at church that night so we decided to all leave together around 3:30pm.  As we were getting ready, the power went out (right around 3:10pm).  We figured we would go to church and by the time we got home the power would be back on.  Well, we got home around 7:30pm and there was still no power and the inside temp was down to 60 degrees.  I called the energy company and they told us they had people working on the problem but they couldn't say when it would be back up again.  So we decided to go to bundle up and go to bed.  Thankfully, Little L adores her "bankies" and so she sleeps with 6-8 blankets each night (we knew she would stay nice and toasty even with the lower temps).  After Little L was all tucked in, the hubby and I put some extra layers on with some extra blankets and tried to fall asleep.  We figured the power would come back on sometime in the middle of the night so we left the lights next to our beds on so we would know when it did.  We didn't sleep that great since we kept hoping the power was going to come back on, but when our alarm went off at 6:30am it was still dark and cold.

You can kind of see Little L checking out her flashlight in this pic (it actually wasn't quite this dark in the house since the nearby lights that were on were reflecting off the snow)

I used a flash on this one so you can actually see!

I gave the energy company another call that morning to try and gage the situation but all they could tell me was there were 6,000 customers of theirs (we get power from one of the smaller energy companies in town) that still didn't have power and they had been working through the night to fix it.  We didn't want to sit around in a cold house (it was now down to 50 degrees) with no electricity for who knows how long so the hubby called his parents and we asked if we could crash at their place for the day.  We stopped at McDonald's on the way up for breakfast since we couldn't even boil water (our stove is electric) and I didn't want to be going in and out of the fridge.

Going to Grandma and Grandpa's was the fun treat that the power outage gave us!  Little L loved running around while we watched the fabulous Vikings game and ate yummy leftovers.  Of course, something else had to happen to make things more exciting for us so Little L ended up having a leaky diaper and, the wonder mom that I am, I had forgotten to grab an extra outfit as a "just in case".  Thankfully, we are a creative bunch!  I quickly rinsed out Little L's clothes and threw them in the dryer and while we were waiting for them to be done, we made a makeshift dress out of one of Grandma's shirts!  Hey, it worked!  :)

After the game was lost done, we gave our neighbors a call to see if the power had come back on yet (the neighbors to the east of us actually had power the whole time so they were extremely gracious and went over to our house to check on it every once in a while!)  Unfortunately, at 3pm we were still dark.  Around 4pm the hubby and I were trying to figure out what we were going to do in case we didn't regain power that night. Thankfully, just as we had agreed upon our next steps, we got a call from our neighbor with the awesome news that our power was back on only 25 hours after it had gone out!  So we packed up our things and drove home.  Little L wouldn't nap at Grandma and Grandpa's but she did get a short one in on the drive back to the house.

By the time we got home, the power had been on for a little over an hour so the house was actually pretty toasty!  It felt so amazing to be back home and I was just overwhelmed with thankfulness for all of the blessings we have in our lives.  There are so many that don't know where they will sleep tonight or, even if they do have a place to call home, they don't have all of the fabulous amenities that we take for granted everyday.  We found out after the fact that at the peak of the storm there were over 200,000 customers without power and some of them (I think around 10,000) lost power Saturday morning and didn't get it back until Monday!  And even though our weekend didn't end up looking like we thought it would, we were still able to have some unexpected fun with family and make some memories too!