Christmas 2009

This Christmas was one for the books! For starters, it started raining and sleeting about two days before Christmas Eve, only to change to snow the next day and dump 21 inches on us over the next three days!! Along with the snow came wind and ice, cancelling any travel plans for the holidays that we had. Once we made peace with the fact that we weren't going anywhere for Christmas, we settled in for a long, winter holiday...

I had to work on Christmas Eve, but was able to go home by early afternoon. It wasn't long after I got home that the wind came up and really started freezing everything up! About 4:30pm, we were sitting around discussing what our plans were for the evening... decided I was going to make taverns and we would open gifts after supper. Not more than 5 minutes later, the TV and lights went off... all the electricity to the house was off!! Thank God for cell phones, since our house phone is a cordless that doesn't work without electricity! We called the neighbors next door to be sure that it was a power outage and not just something that was affecting us. Found out that quite a few of our neighbors were without power. The next call was to Midamerican Energy (which of course is routed to Des Moines to be answered because of the holiday) only to have them tell us that they have been receiving calls for this area and are sending someone out to fix it. They also told us they would call once the electricity was turned back on... which I think is kinda unnecessary, since I would see that the electicity is on once the lights come back on!! We decided to wait it out and see how long it would take to fix the problem. Zach decided to take a nap and Brianna and I started playing board games. CJ just kept pacing around wondering when Midamerican Energy was going to call back!! When it started to get dark, Brianna and I gathered every candle we had in the house and lit them all! Since every single one of them was a different scent, we had a very interesting smelly combination -- some Sugar Plum Spice, along with Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Baked Apple Pie, Citrus Melon, and even one called Angel's Kiss...

After two hours had gone by, CJ called the electric company back and they still couldn't give us an estimated time that they would have the problem fixed. The kids were getting hungry and everyone was anxious about Christmas, so we packed up a couple frozen pizzas and our gifts and braved the wind and snow to head over to my sister's house. At least she had heat and light, so we could fix some pizza and open presents! We finally called one of the neighbors shortly after 9pm and found out that the electricity had just come back on... so we packed up and headed back home to get ready for Santa Claus!!

I was the first one awake on Christmas morning... thanking God that the electricity was still on and hoping we wouldn't have a repeat performance of the night before. CJ and the kids got up shortly after and we opened more presents. The kids are pretty happy -- Brianna got her Nintendo DSi and Zach got his IPod Touch! This is the first Christmas that we spent together without any other family around. We missed everyone, but it was good to know that everyone was safe and sound in their own homes during this "epic" storm! By the way, CJ and Zach have been scooping ever since Christmas Day!! Everytime they get done, the snowplow either comes by and blocks the driveway in again, or we get more snow and have to repeat the whole process again!! Can't wait for Spring!!!!