the electricity went out....





....for about 7 hours. I realize this doesn't sound like a big deal. But when you live in weather that's still past 100 degrees after the sun goes down, and you're trying to get 3 little ones to sleep, with no a/c, and a really pathetic dinner of frozen pizza cooked on the grill outside inside their tummies, and no noise machine (the worst of them all...we are really poor sleepers around here), it was sort of a big deal.

It was actually kind of fun for the first bit of the evening. We ate outside where it was still a bit light, swam in the pool, trying to lower our body temps, and had fun as a family. It felt like camping. Shad whipped out the flashlights and camping lantern. We felt a duty to eat the melting icecream in the freezer. It was fun.

Until no one could fall asleep. First we set them up in our room, thinking they wouldn't be as scared. But are room is the warmest, so we moved everything into the playroom. The coolest, and also messiest room in the house. We covered the kids little bodies with wet wash cloths, remembered we had a noise machine app on our iPad, and finally they konked out.

It's scary to think that 7 hours with no electricity was a "big deal" to us. It was a good kick in the bum to remind me that I need to get our food storage in order, we need to move our huge water tank from our old house/garage and move it here, fill it and treat it. I need to figure out where our gas shut-off is at our new house, and buy one of those handy tools to shut it off in case of an emergency. I need to ask Shad where all of our 72 hour kits are. I knew all this stuff in our old house. I felt prepared. But when the electricity went out, I was reminded quickly that I'm not organized/prepared at all in this house.

I kind of felt like the electricity going off for a mere 7 hours, was a huge gift. A needed reminder.