Lights Out

Some days make you appreciate the little things in life. Yesterday, our power was out from 12:45pm until 9:45pm after a bird took down a transformer a few blocks from our house. If you're having dinner with your sweetheart and you have a fireplace, a power outage might make for a romantic evening. If you have young children, an outage might be an adventure now that the TV is off and you have to find flashlights when it starts to get dark. But on a chilly day in Portland when you have an infant with a cold and a preschooler with autism, a power outage is a real pain in the tukus. And I'm sure the bird wasn't having a good day, either.

Luckily, the kids and I had finished making lunch and drying the bedsheets before the power went out. And we were out of the house for speech therapy for a couple of hours in the afternoon. But when we were home, Elliot was more than a little upset when I couldn't cook him a quesadilla (with a corn tortilla and rice cheese, of course), we couldn't look at videos and photos on the computer, and his beloved bedside digital clock didn't work. Thankfully we had Imogen to entertain us. And a fire in the wood stove when Papa got home with Burgerville for dinner (sans bun, of course). And Elliot loved the indiglo travel alarm clock I let him take to bed with him.

So maybe it was an adventure after all. It could have been worse. It could have been American Idol night. And Thomas and I sat by the woodstove and talked after Elliot went to bed while Imogen snoozed in the firelight.

And at least the power outage didn't happen yesterday, when we had our friends Michael and Tracy over for dinner. They are expecting a baby next month. Here's Tracy balancing Imogen on her 8-month belly.


Now back to catching up on all that email I missed while the power was out!