An earthquake and a hurricane were not enough. Nature had more fun planned for us lowly Easterners; a very early snowstorm on full leafy trees. Not a happy combo.

We managed to get our pumpkins carved just a few days before the storm hit.

I’ve talked myself out of buying those fancy pumpkin carving kits for years now and I finally gave in this year and it was the fastest, easiest and safest pumpkin carving EVER! I highly recommend them.

Here are the finished products of this year’s pumpkin fest

We also managed to get our pumpkin cookies decorated…

Little miss snitching a cookie. She took a bite before I could put the camera down.

We lit our jack-o-lanterns for ONE night and the next day it snowed 6 inches…..
took down tons of branches from most trees in our area, and knocked out power to 3 million people on the East Coast. It looked like a war zone and sounded like one too as all the tree limbs snapped and trees toppled. There were power lines down everywhere, branches and trees fell all over the roads. I wish I had gotten some pictures. The night of the storm Rock went out to do some work and couldn’t even get home there was so much debris on the roads. He had to walk the last 1/2 mile home. Thus began our 5 days without power. We were ready for a power outage back in August with the hurricane but the cold made things pretty miserable after a while.

On the first day without power, Levi snuck upstairs with the cocoa container and failed to get it back down the stairs full.

When this happened I was upset, but reasonably calm, thinking, “Hey, the vacuum will take care of this!” I then walked all the way over to the closet, hauled the vacuum up the stairs and was about to plug it into the outlet before I remembered, “DUH! WE HAVE NO POWER!” Then I was no longer reasonably calm. I still don’t think we’ve gotten it all out of the carpet.
That night when it got dark, Liberty was a little tentative about all the dark rooms. She would walk over to the dinning room and just stand in the entry way and peer into the darkness. You could see the wheels turning in her head. “Hmm, I know something is different here… can’t put my finger on it, though.” But after a day or so she was very comfortable just toddling into a room even if there was no light.

On the second day of no power we had pancakes and eggs on our Coleman stove for breakfast. Yummy! They canceled church so rather than listening to the kids run wild in the house all day we piled them in the warm car and drove all the way south of Trenton (1.5 hours away) to buy the first generator we could find. We decided that after 3 major windstorms in just 10 years we finally needed to invest in one.
Here we are piled into the van all cozy warm with our DVD player and generator.

Thanks to the generator we now had one small, warm, lit room, a working sump pump, freezer and fridge for the rest of the outage. Our house was still freezing, though, and we spent the next five days in our long underwear.

On day 3 I slipped on the basement stairs and hurt my tailbone pretty bad. Rock took pity on me and stayed home from work to help with the kids. And Halloween was postponed! since no one had power. The kids were very bummed about that. We did eventually get to go trick or treating a week late. I’ll post some pictures here soon of those.

On day 4 I attempted to homeschool and gave up after about an hour because we were all cold and none of us were really in the mood. Telling them that Abraham Lincoln learned to read without electricity didn’t seem to inspire them much and I was still in a lot of pain anyway. If it hadn’t hurt to sit I would have just read them stories all day long-they would have loved that. That afternoon my sainted visiting teacher, who had finally gotten power back, took all 4 kids to her house for a while to play.

On day 5 I was beginning to lose my mind. It really wasn’t that bad so I’m not sure why it was so hard mentally and emotionally, but it was. We were all going stir crazy I guess. The neighborhood rumble of generators was deafening, I was tired of being cold and I just wanted a light switch to work! Oh, and I wanted to be able to sleep through the night instead of being waked up every single night by one child or another because their flashlight batteries had died and they were in the pitch black. It is VERY cold at night in a house with no power and getting out of bed twice a night was getting very old! They had finally been told that on pain of death did they wake me up. They were to just close their eyes and think happy thoughts! Note to self: Buy WAY more D batteries than you think you need next time!

Just as I was separating the laundry to do at a friend’s house the lights miraculously came on. It was a miracle. Electricity IS a miracle. We use miraculous inventions every day and we take these little miracles for granted! I have now been thoroughly chastened for my ingratitude! I was almost in tears I was so relieved! I started jumping up and down and clapping and cheering and Libby thought I had lost my mind. I was so thrilled that to celebrate I made everyone’s favorite chicken noodle casserole and homemade bread-in the OVEN! Nothing has ever tasted so good. And we are all, even Levi, STILL thanking Heavenly Father for the electricity.