Last week ended up being quite a week for us! We were struggling through the lingering tail-end of a week-long stomach bug (which left us with few naps, even less patience, and lots of toddler behavior) and we survived our first earthquake and then hurricane as a family! The earthquake was wild . . . we heard it coming before we felt it, and once I realized what it was, I swooped everyone up and we headed to the basement. William was very upset because he was in the basement without his shoes on (I have trained him well)! Hudson kept talking about it thunderin’ . . . we were fine and grateful for it! Hudson was the only one who woke up during the aftershock a few nights later—he told us about the thunderin’ again. Wild!
On Saturday, Hurricane Irene came through Richmond. We are all fine, and we are so grateful for that. Several homes in our area have trees down and a home that very-much resembles ours a few blocks away has a tree through the middle of it—when I saw that, it just made me sick. If that had been our house, the tree would have gone through my boys’ room. We are so thankful that we are all safe!
We saw this on our way home from my parents’ on Saturday around 2pm—and, the bad part of the storm hadn’t started yet!
On Saturday, we lost power around noon due to a tree falling on the lines in our alley. Our friends invited us over for dinner, so we threw on our hurricane gear and headed over in the wind and rain to escape the darkness!
Since Sister didn’t have a rain coat, we put her in a sweater with a hat and with a hooded towel overtop!
She didn’t mind the darkness or the rain!
While we were at our neighbor’s house, their power went out too. And, we realized we were approaching the 36 hour mark of food in our fridge. So, Hatch took a load of fridge food to a friend’s house. And, yes, head lamps are most handy when the power is out (just don’t blind your baby with yours)! He may have been less-than-thrilled that I was taking a picture of him while he was hauling food across our neighborhood at 10pm. While he was out, he saw that a massive tree had fallen on a house and that another tree was completely blocking our street. Wild!
Sunday morning brought some drier weather and we were able to survey the damage a little better. The boys were so very excited to see all of the activity going on to clean up our street!
DIGGERS!!!
This boy was barely able to contain his excitement—he was talking a mile a minute about the diggers!
Loving life!
And, this is our new favorite truck. I’m not sure what the name of it is, but it has a crane that picks up the huge trees and a dump truck bed to put them in . . . our whole family enjoyed this excitement, can’t you tell? We spent most of our Sunday driving around Richmond trying to save our food and looking for trees and trucks all around the city!
After the crazy winds from this storm, about 75% of our city was without power. Thankfully, we were able to save most of our food—I carried around a cooler with me for two days, and we had our fridge food in two friend’s homes and our freezer stuff at my mom’s (they have a small generator.) As I write this, my mom and sister are still without power! Many stop lights don’t have power, and so driving has been scary, to say the least! My husband feels very strongly that the people doing traffic updates on the news should alert drivers that we should treat all traffic lights without power like a four-way-stop. (See Hatch, I have done my duty of spreading the word and reminding people of driver’s ed!)
Our neighbors’ across the street got power back on Sunday because one of our sweet neighbors who works for Dominion (check out his wife’s wonderful photography site here) got off of his 12 hour shift and went to fix their power on his own time! Our power was said to take a while longer because it needed new poles and new lines due to the tree falling in the alley. Yesterday, our neighbor was able to work with the cracked poles and fix the line so that our lights came on . . . they will come and finish the job (new poles, etc.) later this week. We have great neighbors, don’t you think? We are so grateful for them!
Here’s to a less interesting week this week!
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