Lights Out

One nutty day a couple of weeks before Christmas we were just having a normal old morning with kids doing online school and me puttering around trying to be productive and un-annoying to the kids the same time. It's harder than you'd think. Suddenly there was a big explosion sound from across the street where a bunch of construction was going on at the hospital parking lot. Romney even told me she saw a flash through the attic window. And just that moment all our lights blinked out and three confused kids came to me with questioning faces, wondering what the heck they were supposed to do to attend school with no power and no internet. 

Yay!

Suddenly the day got a lot more interesting. You know, with every kid in the district attending school from home using technology, they are bound to have technological problems all the time from a handful of kids at any given time. But that doesn't mean that there is a lot of patience or understanding or excusal when something goes wrong. At least it has felt that way. So we started scrambling in a hurry. We decided that the best idea was to mooch off of our friends who have a studio apartment in their backyard. I was very relieved and grateful when I contact them and asked about us possibly crashing there for the day and they didn't have any Air B&B guests staying so we were welcome.

We loaded up all our school stuff, plus we gathered some food for lunch there and spent the rest of the day doing school all together in one room. Thank you, my children, for not killing each other that day. It's not easy to do that all in the same room! The distractions are many.

I'll admit that that day really wore me out. I was pretty stressed for the kids and didn't want them to get behind. I felt anxious about the power outage and kept making trips back and forth to grab various things for the kids and check on our heat-dependent pets who were all just fine by the way. I confess to getting extremely and possibly unreasonably crabby. Finally after a long afternoon of school and homework, the sun went down and Troy was on his way home from work. We packed up our stuff, tried to tidy up and left our neighbors to head for home. Troy was so sweet and encouraged us to get take out from one of our favorite restaurants, Zao, and while the kids and I were picking it up, he was home building a fire, lighting candles and even hanging a strand of battery-powered lights in the tree. I am the luckiest. I came home to a cozy and warm living room, good food, and cheerful lights twinkling on the tree. 

What ended up happening was one of those nights that our family will absolutely always remember. We just gathered up in the room with nothing to do but hang out together. We pulled out a family-favorite game, Sheriff of Nottingham, and everyone played. Well, not me. I was curled up on the big chair almost dozing while simultaneously keeping our dear lizard warm. He's a very good little lizard and I'm incredibly fond of him. 

It ended up being a really fun night. The kids were in good moods and making each other laugh like crazy, especially when Chase started making any and all comments in his Kronk voice. I don't dare to share the comment from Troy that prompted Chase to say, in full Kronk, "I don't know, it's pretty far up there," but that phrase made us laugh until we were sick.

It was such a magical night. We finally banked the fire and blew out the candles and crawled under piles of blankets around 10:00 or 10:30 and drifted off to sleep. Just an hour or so later I heard a little click and saw the nightlight in the kitchen come back on. I knew the next day would be business as usual and that was a relief but also a little sad after our really really fun and memorable evening.