Injury

One hour after the power came on we were running around the house celebrating the return of light, heat, and tv. I had Jonathan help me move the two mattresses to our room and Joel's room and was making some progress on getting the house back in order and Jacksen was chasing Joel into our bedroom and Joel jumped onto a pile of pillows at the bottom of my bed and his little head completely missed the pillows and hit the corner of our wood bed frame. He immediately started screaming and blood was pouring everywhere. So I called his dr. of coarse they were closed for the day so I called the insurance to see what they wanted me to do. They told us to take him to the er. The RN on the phone was in California so he had no idea what all was going on here. I informed him that hospitals here were without power and they were telling people to not go unless it was life or death injury. With no help from the insurance I decided to just take him to an urgent care facility where they super glued his head back together. He did amazingly well. Before gluing it the dr opened the wound to see how deep it was and it was a half inch deep. Jonathan and I both about got sick.

He is fine today just has a headache. Jennah is also sick today. She started running a fever about 102 yesterday afternoon and has a bad cough. What a week!

Thank God for Electric

Okay maybe I need to be thanking God for natural gas rather than electric. Without natural gas I don't think our family would have survived at home the 81 hours we were without power. So much happened in that forever long three and a half days I feel the need to give a play by play.

12:45 am After a very relaxing Sunday of napping, stocking the kitchen (we knew the weather was going to get bad and wanted to prepare), and cooking soup and baking homemade pecan sticky buns it seemed like this was going to be a great little vacation from all the craziness of this time of year. Like I wrote before I had taken a long nap and stayed up vegging in front of the tv until 12:30. I finally got sleepy enough to go to bed. Fifteen minutes later the electric went off. I woke Jonathan and we decided to go ahead and move the two queen size mattresses to the small living room where the gas log fireplace is. After getting the kids tucked into their new sleeping arrangements we decided we better shower now so we would have hot water. Finally at 2:00am we were asleep.

Powerless at 4:15 am I get a call on my cell phone. Who could be calling at this time? It was my new neighbor and cousin Jenny. She had slipped on the ice while getting firewood and hurt her hip. Jonathan and I ran to her house to see if we could help. As we got to Jenny's the neighbors on the other side of Jenny were pulling a tree off three of their cars. Jenny said Alan (her husband who was working) was on his way to get her to take her to the hospital. I completely flashed back to five years ago when I broke my tailbone on the ice. We were now in charge of Riley. I decided to stay there with her until she woke and then take her to our house.

Powerless at 4:45 am The next hour was spent walking from window to window every time I heard a tree fall which was pretty constant.

Powerless at 5:45 am Riley wakes up. I called Jonathan to help me get over to our house with Riley. Then I changed her and fed her a bottle in the dark trying not to wake all three of our kids that were sleeping 5 feet away.

Powerless at 6:45 am Riley finally goes back to sleep so I lay down and try to sleep again. 10 minutes later Jenny calls and they are heading home. She has bruised her hip. They will shower and be over to get Riley.

Powerless at 7:00 am I decide to outside and survey all the damage. It was crazy. I have never seen anything like this. We had three neighbors taking pictures of the damage at our house.

Powerless at 8:00 am I head back inside to find all three of the kids are up and wondering why we are all sleeping in the small living room. They are also telling us to try again to turn the lights on. I wish it was that simple.

Powerless at 8:45 am We discover we have a gas hot water tank! Yeah! We have hot water.

Powerless at 9:00 am Alan picks up Riley and Jonathan leaves for work.

Powerless at 9:15 am What am I going to do with three kids in one 250 sqft. room with no electric on 2 hours of sleep?

Powerless at 11:30 am We made it to lunch time. I heated up soup for Jonathan and I on the gas log fireplace and the kids roasted hot dogs on the fire. Not Bad!

Powerless at 1:00 pm This is where the real fun begins. I walked through the big living room to get something from the kitchen and water started pouring out of the ceiling fan WHAT! Luckily my parents had just come over to see the damage for themselves. My dad helped me find where it was coming from while my mom stayed with the kids.

Powerless at 1:05 pm Jonathan called right before his meeting with the CEO of the bank to make sure we were okay here at home. I told him what had happened and he rushed home just in time to crawl through a small hole into the attic that I was dreading climbing into. The rest of the afternoon was spent temporarily stopping the leak with lots of buckets. Until the ice on the roof melted this was all we could do. I think we ended up dumping about 10 gallons of water that afternoon. Thank God we stayed at home and discovered the leak. There could have been much more damage.

Powerless at 8:00 pm Not much to do after dark with no electric I went to sleep. Jonathan and the kids played a game of chess and checkers then went to sleep about 8:30.

31 hours w/o power We had a good nights sleep and woke up thinking today was going to go much better than the day before only to find multiple leaks in an area about 10ft by 6ft. Pure panic set in!

37 hours w/o power It is as good as it is going to get. We sealed the hole made by a 2 inch in diameter branch that was sticking in the roof about 2 feet!

44 hours w/o power We had just settled into bed for the night and heard a crashing sound so we ran into the living room to discover the ceiling has caved in. We suspected this would happen and bought a tarp and had it down in preparation for this. Only thing we didn't prepare for was that upon collapsing the soaked drywall and insulation would swing out and hit our entertainment center that we had pulled out of the way. Not much damage was done though. We will just need to clean it up a little.

This was most of the branches and trees after cleanup.

After Tuesday nights collapse nothing really big happened. Wednesday we mainly tried to clean up as much as we could without power. Then Thursday morning at 10:00 the power came back on! YEAH!

Getting Crafty

This time of the year I start getting cabin fever and want to start all kinds of projects. When I say projects I don't mean organizing the closets or alphabetizing the pantry (although Jon wishes that were the case). I mean craft projects. I wanted to make all new ornaments for the tree this year but couldn't decide on what colors to use so I am going to think about it all year and try it next year. So I settled on decorating a wreath. I bought the wreath pre-lit and added all the berries, pine cones, and ribbon. I think it turned out really nice and much cheaper than purchasing one already decorated. Next up sewing curtains for the billiardless billiards room as Jonathan calls it.

Classy Christmas Party

Last Saturday night Jonathan had his annual work Christmas party. As I do every year I stressed about what to wear. The invitation said cocktail attire. I so I shopped for a week straight and thought I had something that would work only to decide Friday evening the outfit would not work. So now I have about a hundred dollars worth of clothes and shoes to take back. Saturday at about noon I left to try to find something for the party that started at 6:30. I finally had something. I normally wear jeans and t-shirts so I had a hard time finding something that I thought was "cocktail attire". I guess my definition of cocktail attire was different than the others at the party. What most the ladies were wearing to me qualified as semi-formal. I was just about the only one wearing color. I decided I didn't care and was going to enjoy the evening away from the kids.

The party was at the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame. Sounds pretty classy right? Wrong! The entertainment for the evening was what they called Little E. Jonathan and I were unaware of who exactly Little E was. He was a little person dressed as Elvis. I don't know why everyone thought it was so funny. There was nothing funny about it to us. It was just weird. Then after Little E moved his lips to two Elvis songs he went to greet people and have his picture made with everyone. Seriously! It was the strangest thing. I am surprised Jonathan even let me blog about it as embarrassing as it was. Oh well. He did win a $50 gift card so I guess it was worth it.

I didn't get a picture of us together this year. Jennah said we looked good. She is our little fashion coach. She is always ready to tell me if my outfit looks good or not. She said we looked like one of the couples on Dancing with the Stars. I think that's a good thing.