You don't know what you got till it's gone....

Power that is...

We've had quite an eventful week in the Vance house. Monday morning, we woke up to a tremendous thunderstorm. Daddy had to travel for work, so we were all up early. As he was about to leave, weather warnings popped up on all the major news channels. We were right in a line of major storms. Daddy headed out of the door to to beat the weather. We went about our morning routine... for about 15 minutes. Then, it started. Thankfully, I'd made my coffee, Daisy had eaten and I had already nursed and fed you breakfast. This was some kind of storm. The winds were fierce and believe it or not, the storm was short lived; however, the damage had already been done. We lost power.... along with over 800,000 other residents.

This wasn't a big deal at first. I had cranked the air down the night before, so the house was cool. I pulled the shades in preparation for a warm day. I knew to keep the deep freeze, freezer, and fridge shut. We went about our normal day. Everything was fine. I called the power company to check on restoration time and that's when I panicked a little "...several days..." Normally, this wouldn't be an issue. You and I were fine. We could get out in the car to cool down and recharge at the local Starbucks. It also gave me a good excuse to eat out and you a chance to dine on some store-bought baby food :) BUT, my milk... my precious, precious, precious milk.  I had 50 bags of "liquid gold" in the freezer. This translates (roughly) into a two week supply of milk. These bags were my insurance policy. If something ever happened to me, I needed to be away from you, if my milk supply dropped, if you needed extra... this was for those times. It represented hours of pumping and a whole lot of love. I was NOT going to lose this milk. No sir, not now. I sat tight. I patiently waited, but all the while, milk was on my mind. The power company had 48 hours, according to the FDA, to get the power back on and the freezer running. Every hour that passed, I got a little more antsy.

By mid day, things were still ok. I wanted to get us both out of the house. A trip to Target for some food for you and a trip to Starbucks for a recharge of the phone (and me!). To do this, I had to manually open the garage. Not a big deal. I executed it perfectly. I backed the car out, went to pull down the garage door down, it was a little high, so I jumped.... and knocked the sensor off its track (you know, the little black box that shoots the laser beam).  Awesome. I didn't break it, I just knew it would take some work to get it realigned. Nothing your super-star daddy couldn't fix :) but not something I wanted to tell him I did (by the way, he totally calmed my fears about it when I did and it was easier to fix than we thought).

5pm rolls around, which is dinner time for you. I strapped you in the high chair to let the fun begin. Dinner time is about an hour process for you and you love every bit of it. I sit with you at the table most of the time and begin the dishes and cleaning up when you're wrapping it up. You were working on your last two Cheerios and I decided to take the trash out. Now, the door to the garage is practically in our kitchen and the big trash bin is just outside the door. Since it was so hot out (and the air was off from the power outage), I wanted to save every bit of cool air I could and pulled the door shut behind me. It took less than 5 seconds to open the bin, put the bag in and turn around to grasp the door handle. It didn't turn. Yep, I'd locked you in the house and myself out (as a side, we never lock this door since our garage door is locked. With the outage, the garage was unlocked, so I had locked the door when we came in for the night and out of habit didn't realize it) I panicked. I checked a couple of our doors. Nothing. I ran to our neighbors house (you know, the ones that picked me up when I threw my back out and couldn't move...great neighbors! probably think the new kids on the block are needy). I was practically in tears asking to borrow their phone. We all decided 911 was the best option. An officer was disbatched. In the mean time, my neighbor successfully broke into our house. Whew! (I think...slightly scary but the dead bolt wasn't on). You were still sitting in your high chair, as happy as could be. I scooped you up and covered you in kisses. We no longer needed the officer.

Mommy decided she needed to go to bed and start the day over. Thankfully, Mrs. Mindy helped mommy laugh it off, since Daddy always misses the fun at our house. We always joke about things happening when he's away.

We were lucky, our power was restored within 24 hours. My milk was safe!!!! Mrs. Mindy and Conner weren't so lucky. They didn't get power back until Thursday night. They spent a lot of time at our house and out and about in town. Never a dull moment :)