We have electric!

For some of you the title doesn’t make much sense, but you will see soon how exciting our week turned out to be.  First I’m going to start with ‘tornado Peter’…

If studied closely, this picture tells a 2 hour story. Begin at the top right – the books are pulled from the shelf where we read for a few minutes. Then the pillows were being tossed in the air.  Next, Peter was jumping off the couch onto the blanket.  Balloon toss came next.  We had worked up an appetite so it was time for a popcorn snack.  Popcorn, of course, was everywhere within minutes.  Last, instead of cleaning up the popcorn, the hand puppets were going to eat it up  (see the pig next to the sleeping pillow).  Peter also thought he didn’t need a nap.  He was just going to rest for a minute.

Now for the exciting part of the week. On Wednesday night a pesky wind storm passed over a caused a bit of trouble around here.  At 4:45 am on Thursday morning I woke up hearing….c-r-e-e-a-a-a-k  -  crunch (forgive my lack of better description.)  Mark and I jumped out of bed and noticed the electric was out.  Being surrounded by very large trees made us pretty nervous so we immediately ran upstairs and found nothing to be damaged in the house.  So Mark grabbed a flashlight and went outside. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The middle picture on the left shows the best where the fallen piece came from.  It was the center shoot of the tree right in front of our house.  Had the wind been blowing off the lake it would have hit our house.  Luckily Mark parked the Toyota in the street that night and only suffered a few good dents and scratches.  Unfortunately, the tree came down right across our power line connection to our house (and only our house).  So we went without electric until yesterday evening.  Yes, I know it wasn’t even 48 hours, but have you tried staying home lately with 2 kids and no electric?  I was ready for the power back!  Our landlords were very gracious and offered many things to keep us comfortable.  We ran an extension chord to their old house so we could keep our refrigerator running and phones charged.  

 

 

 

(And a few other conveniences – Peter was desperate to watch a video )  Is it sad when the power turned on the first thing he did was run to the tv and try to turn it on?

 

 

 

When the power trucks finally came on Friday evening (around 7 pm) we were in the back yard playing and I started jumping up and down and waving.  I don’t think they’ve ever received that kind of welcome.  They had a good chuckle I’m sure.

The other craziness we’ve been dealing with this week is Joey.  On Wednesday, I finally broke down and took him to the pediatrician after fighting three days of off and on fever and diarhea.  I guess there’s a stomach virus going around that the doc thought he could have and then he had an ear infection too.  So we got a prescription for Cefdinir and started it on Wednesday.  By Friday morning he was totally broken out in a crazy rash.  He didn’t seem too bothered by it but he was our little polka dot boy.  It’s still working on clearing up this weekend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ahh…snuggles.  We weren’t quite ready to get up from nap yet.

So, now we’re done with most of the random chaos – and it’s back to work.  For those of you coming to visit this summer, you will appreciate Mark’s hard work.  He figured out how to rip and roll the english ivy out back and cleared out a huge section so we can plant grass seed next weekend.  It looks amazing!  He did a great job. I just can’t explain how difficult it really is until you’ve tried to pull that stuff up yourself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While Mark was busy working hard, Dallas (the grounds keeper) was driving the tractor around picking up sticks and not far behind was Peter on the gator.  I have a priceless video I will post later of Peter following Racell (the other grounds keeper) during the tree clean up.

All that hard work made a little boy very sleepy.