Power Outage

Starting Monday, here in the O-H-I-O, we has some fun weather coming our way. Tuesday morning we woke up to a quarter inch of ice covering everything, including our cars. And the weather was only supposed to get worse from there! Our friends to the north were expecting to get a lot of snow, but we were supposed to get a "warm" front that would just bring us freezing rain and a lot of wind. We went to bed at about 10 pm on Tuesday night. At 10:45 I woke up because it sounded like some idiot was doing fireworks outside. I looked out the window, and I saw a bunch of smoke and flashes of light. Then I saw it. A power line had snapped and was going crazy, making sparks fly everywhere. Then the power went out. The snapped line was two houses down from ours and caused a small fire to start, but because it was raining outside, it went out quickly. Jordan and I figured there wasn't much we could do about it, so we put extra blankets on the kids and went back to bed. When we woke up the next morning, it was 58 degrees in the house, and dropping. Jordan had school, even after he diligently checked to see if it was cancelled about every 30 minutes until the power went out! Clara, Lucas and I tried to brave our cold house for a little while, but the temperature kept dropping. We finally went over to David and Megan's house when it hit 55 degrees. It was just too cold for us! We spent the day just hanging out and trying to figure out what to do. We decided to spend the night back at our house. Some friends from our ward loaned us their propane space heater that is safe for indoor use. I got our the camping stove so we could heat up water for hot cocoa and oatmeal for breakfast the next morning. We brought the kids into our room and had a little slumber party. Parties like that hold very little slumber for me. The next morning, we had a picnic breakfast on the floor of our room. Clara thought that was the coolest thing ever, but she kept asking why she couldn't go play with her toys are be in her room. We tried to teach her about electricity, but only so much can sink into a 2 1/2 year olds mind. I called up my friend Hillary and asked her if she was up for a play date that morning. Luckily she was! As I was leaving, I saw someone from the power company checking the lines. He was about to leave, then asked me if we had power. I told him no and that we had made several calls to the power company to report the outage. He knew nothing about the calls and at first couldn't find anything wrong with the lines, except for the broken one that went to a vacant house, so we was going to leave. I guess a transformer blew, and he couldn't tell that from the ground. I am so glad I stopped and talked to him! Because only 4 or 5 houses were affected by this line being out, we were on the bottom of the fix it list. There were places that had 20-30 or more houses affected by one problem that were a higher priority. But since the guy was there, he said he would fix it right up! YEAH! We went over to Hillary and Leila's for a play date, and when we got home, we had POWER and HEAT! YEAH! Our house got down into the 40's by then. Luckily our fridge was pretty bare, so we didn't lose a lot of food or anything. For the next month, Clara made sure to add electricity to the list of things she is thankful for in her prayers!