Around 4am, early Sunday morning, I was nursing Noah and could hear this strange crackling noise coming from outside the house. We were in the middle of a freezing ice/rain storm that had swept the entire mid-Michigan area. One of the reasons we decided not to spend Saturday night at the hospital was due to this bad storm.
But anyway, the crackling... I finished nursing, put Noah back down in his crib, and got back into bed. I woke John and told him about the strange noise I was hearing. We both walked into our kitchen to look out our back windows where the noise was coming from. John could see one of the electric transformer boxes in our neighbor's backyard spitting sparks from it. This was not a good sign. Moments later, John watched the box explode and we lost power immediately. In fact, half of our neighborhood went black.
Hmm... now what?! We knew that it was not an option to get out of the house at this precise moment. Our heat wouldn't drop too low between now and the morning when we could figure out the game plan. So we bundled ourselves up, added an extra blanket to Hannah's bed, and added a hat and blanket to Noah, and tried to go back to sleep for a couple more hours.
John woke early and headed to Home Depot down the road to get the part we needed to hook our generator. The store only had ONE of these parts remaining. John waited until the store opened, it was a zoo of people waiting in line. When the doors opened, people made a mad dash toward the generators. John quietly (and quickly) walked back to find his part. Thankfully he found it and rushed back home.
In the meantime, I bundled up the kids and we cuddled in our bed together. Hannah grabbed a few books that we read and I snuggled Noah up close to my chest.
All snuggled up in bed together (you can see Noah's blue hat in there) Hannah being her normal silly self!
I packed up bags for myself, John, and each of the kids and we headed over to John's parents' house a few miles down the road. They had lost power but they had their generator up and running. At least we could be in the heat and stay warm.
We later learned that thousands of people were without power. The whole Lansing area was basically out and most of the surrounding areas had pockets of no electric. It was also brutally cold. The temps were in the teens and below with a very frigid wind chill, so with no electric to heat your house, things got cold very quickly.
Noah all snuggled up over at my in-laws
John and his dad came back over to our house and began setting our generator up. Thankfully we bought a generator this summer/fall because our house always loses power for just about every storm. Thinking ahead and planning for the what-ifs was the mission with this purchase. John had been saying for quite a few months how he needed to complete the set-up by purchasing the power cord and box so we'd be ready to go if we ever lost power. Needless to say, he never got around to it, and today was the day to get it done.
They spent half of the day installing, running lines, and getting it done right. Thankfully our generator system was up and running by nighttime. After some dinner, we decided to come back home and try to get back to "normal". (Haha! That just sounds funny even writing it now!) We knew if we needed to go back over to my in-laws, it was close enough to us if something went awry.
Monday came and went, still no power. John continued to make frequent trips to the gas station so he could keep re-filling our generator's tank. He had the whole thing down to a science. When to fill up, when to shut the generator off to give it a break, etc. We were just thankful to be able to be home and make sure no damage occurred to our house.
Around 1am on Tuesday, as I sat on the couch nursing Noah, our generator shut off. I called out to John in the dark (who was sleeping) and he quickly jumped out of bed. John put on his warm clothes and headed outside to check things out. He couldn't restart our generator. So now what? Once again, we didn't want to uproot the kids and leave in the middle of the night. Thankfully, John's parents had a second generator that we could borrow. He drove over to his parents to help his dad load it up, and came back home. Within an hour, the second generator was up and going heating our house once more.
We went through Christmas Eve with our generator and still no electric. We tried to keep things around the house as "normal" as possible. Here we are trying to adjust to a newborn, a 2 year old who has no clue what this new baby is about, and trying to keep my fluctuating hormones in check. What a disastrous first few days at home on top of this already hectic holiday season. It certainly hadn't even felt like Christmas yet.
To keep with our normal Christmas day breakfast tradition of eating polish sausage, John got out the grill and took care of that. He even snagged a picture of his "favorite things". His wife, his favorite little girl and boy, grilling, and a beer! This picture is certainly worth a thousand memories!
We woke up Christmas morning to such a beautiful view out our front window. For as much of a hassle and inconvenience the snow/ice storm had provided, it was still a beautiful sight.
Around noon on Christmas day, John spotted a BWL worker walking around our driveway. He ran outside to check things out. The man said they were headed to our area to fix the down transformer box in our back yard!! HOORAY! We would hopefully be getting our power back shortly! Hannah got a kick out of watching the big trucks drive in our backyard, they were certainly a welcomed sight!
Truck drove between our house and neighbors, into our backyard You can sort of see the worker in the bucket
and did the necessary repairs between the 2 pines - this was the
cause of our power outage
Around 2:30 in the afternoon, as we were sitting in the basement playing with Hannah's new Christmas toys, our computer printer turned on. Our power was finally restored! What a wonderful feeling! It was indeed a Christmas miracle :)
We ended up enduring no power from Sunday 4am until Wednesday 2:30pm. This was the longest 3+ days of our lives and a crazy beginning to Noah's. He will have such an interesting story to share with his children someday about the first few days of his life. Throughout our whole endeavor, I was so thankful for John. He kept me sane, kept me together, and kept our house afloat. Without him, the stress would have broken me completely. This challenge we were faced with, only proves that together we can do anything!!
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