Happy SNOW-O-WEEN!

subtitled: What we did during our 30 hour power outage…

sub-subtitled: What the heck-snow in OCTOBER?

Chris attempting to battery start our gas fireplace.  I say attempted, because it didn’t work.  Grateful that it was not windy, just cold.  Now we know for next time – we think we have to have a remote starter.  To Home Depot we will be going soon!

Grateful that my hubby is an amateur meteorologist – because he warned me that the power was probably going to go out.  We had our bathtubs filled with water to flush toilets, pitchers of water, and hot water in a carafe.

Playdough kept us entertained for quite a while ~ Café Hudson was open for business.  His sous chef?  His adorable sister.

We sang some songs together and Daddy serenaded us on his guitar.  Pays to have a musician in the house sometimes all of the time.  Music is always floating in the air somewhere!

We wouldn’t let the kids go out in the storm because we had no way to get them dry and warm – so we played games, did puzzles and art projects and……

attempted a family nap.

(BTW, the wall behind our bed? I am totally doing a post on this sometime soon – Aunt Cindy and Uncle Tommy visited and we got our project on.)

So while we were laying there, the power came back on!  Wahoo!  We transferred Anna to her bed, cranked up the heat, and got as warm as possible.  Grateful we did….because right as we were dressing to go out in the snow after Anna rested for a bit – the power went back off.  Oh well.  We didn’t want to miss a bit of play time in the most PACKABLE snow we have had in a while.

Our neighbor, Dom, came over and played with the kids in the snow.  She went sledding with us last year for her first time ever, so she loves playing with the kids and digging tunnels together.

2 hours later and with darkness fast approaching, we headed inside and whipped up a delicious candle light meal of sliced fruit, meats, cheeses and hot chocolate (with the mint chocolate marshmallows Grandmom got us!).  The kids were a bit disappointed there wasn’t going to be trick-or-treat (because ours was to be on Saturday night), but we promised them that we’d go to a friend’s on the 31st.

We rounded out the night with going through the Toys R Us big book and making a list for Mom-Mom and Poppy, followed by books.  Lots of books. :o)  Daddy took a measurement of the snow after dinner and it was 7.5 inches.  The official by the time the storm was over was 9 inches….in October.  Forgive me, I am still processing this…God and I are still working through my shock.

Of course the next morning, there was no rest for the weary as Chris had to figure out how to get into the church to lead worship services.  I’ve come to learn that big churches don’t close.  Ever.  So he got up early, froze his tuckus off, and ventured to church over our unplowed and untreated roads.  He was able to get a shower there.

When the kids and I crawled out of our down filled bed, we were a bit cold, to say the least.  It was toasty in bed, not so much out of it.  My phone was dying and Hudson used the handcrank emergency radio to recharge it for me – it has a usb input that my phone can plug into. (GRATEFUL!)  He charged it enough that I was able to communicate with Margo and she invited all of us to come get warm and get showers at the mission house. She rocks.  Thank you, Margo.

After church, the power still wasn’t on….but it returned around 4 pm that afternoon.  We had an adventure and reinforced the fact that our family definitely knows how to have fun together.  What a great memory!