"Surviving" Sandy

I put "surviving" in quotations in my title because we really were very lucky with that storm.  We lost power Monday evening as we were eating dinner, but had it back the next morning around 10am.  We have no real damage (a little water mark in Deacon's room that I still need to call housing about - but I'll probably wait until my neighbor's fences and things are fixed.  We are very, very lucky.  Especially considering right outside the gate to our base there are still thousands of people without power, a whole week later.  There are still people whose houses have giant holes in them from where trees landed.  And let's not even mention the Jersey shore and the utter destruction down there.  Yes, we are very lucky indeed.  For posterity, however, I'm still going to blog about those 2 days anyway.

 

On and off all day Sunday and Monday, I would have the news on, tracking Sandy.  Oh, first, let me say that Josh was in Arizona, and texted me on Saturday that his flight home Tuesday was canceled and he was hoping to be home on Thursday.  Awesome.  I wasn't at all surprised, but it still was sad news.  Anyway, with having the news on and off, Zeke got into watching the news (he still asks sometimes if we can put the news on).  They canceled school for Monday and Tuesday, which made sense since no one knew when and where she'd hit exactly, and it's better to be safe than sorry.

 

Monday I made dinner a little early since they were predicting dinner time would be power outage time, and they were right.  Of course, Deacon was still eating when the lights went out, but he powered through.  As he ate his dinner the boys asked question after question about what they could and couldn't do without power. "Can we watch TV?" "No, there's no power." Can we watch a movie?" "No. There's no power." "Can we watch something on the wii?" "No. There's no power." "Can we turn the light on for the fish so they can see better?" "No. There is no power." Once Deacon was finally finished eating, I set the boys up on the couch with "Despicable Me" on the iPad.  While they watched their movie I went around disconnecting all of the smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors that were beeping because their batteries were dying (again, something I should call housing about later), lighting candles (not entirely safe with the smoke detectors disconnected), and knitting (not exactly easy by candle light, but doable).

 

 

After the movie was over it was time for the boys to go to bed, and for the "night of fun" to begin.  I'll begin by saying that Finn slept through the night, in his own bed, like a champion.  Hurricane? What hurricane?  The older 2, not so much.  They started in their own beds.  Zeke was nervous and asked me to spend the evening in my bed too, so I went downstairs, got my candle, knitting, kindle and snack, then retreated to my bed.  Shortly there after I could feel the nervousness growing, so I checked on the boys and moved Deacon, along with his bed and stuff into Zeke's room:

 

 

This made them happy for about 10 minutes.  The wind really started picking up by this point, and I as I looked up from my kindle, there were 2 boys in my room, asking to sleep with me that night.  So, into my bed they hopped.  After a few trips to the bathroom each, they asked me to go get Finn, who was racked out when I went in to check on him. Which is good, because I'm pretty sure the 4 of us wouldn't have fit, nor would we have slept at all.  It was tight enough as it was:

 

(Sorry the pics are blurry, my phone had a smudge on the camera that I didn't notice until later.)

 

A wee bit after we all settled in and I decided I should stop reading and try to get some sleep, Deacon decided he wanted to sleep in his own bed in Zeke's room, so off he trotted, only to return 3 minutes later because he didn't like being alone with such a scary storm outside.  Thus began the slumber shuffle.  We started with Deacon by the window, Zeke in the middle, and me by the door.  After Deacon came back, Zeke and I shifted down so Zeke was by the window, I was in the middle, and Deacon hopped in by the door.  Not 10 minutes later Deacon decided he didn't want to be by the door, so he and Zeke switched places, which left Deacon by the window, me in the middle and Zeke by the door.  Which is how we stayed the rest of the long night.

 

Oh, and because the wind and the rain and the storm itself apparently weren't making enough noise, the wind blew up through a drain or something outside and made this noise in our kitchen all. night. long.  Make sure your volume is all the way up so you can get a better idea of what we were constantly listening too.

 

 

Finally, morning came however, and we had some breakfast, colored a bit, and asked more questions. "Can we cook some eggs?" "No. There's no power."  "Can I have toast for breakfast?" "No. We have no power." "Does the TV work yet?" "No. There's no power." "What are we going to have for dinner?" "That depends on if we have power by then, which we probably won't, so we'll most likely have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner." "I can't see my picture very well, can I turn the light on?" "Sure. Go ahead.  Oh, it's not working? Maybe that's because we have. no. power."  And then, some 17 hours after it went out, the power came back on and we all cheered.  Not sure if it was on for good, or just for a bit while they worked on it more, I didn't let the boys turn much on. But once lunch time rolled around and we still had power, I figured it was on for good, and it was.  To which Zeke immediately asked, "Can we turn on the news?"

 

  (by the playground across the street from our house)

And that was it.  School was closed the rest of the week, Josh made it home Thursday morning and didn't have to work Thursday or Friday (yay!), and Halloween on base had been rescheduled for Friday.  I seriously praise God for keeping us all safe and for providing so much for us through that time, as I continue to pray for those who are still without so much.