In The Middle of the Night With Screaming Kids
As a mom, screaming kids in the middle of the night is not the most welcomed situation! It was, indeed, the middle of the night though; A very dark and stormy night. Thankfully, my children had all been sleeping through the terrible winds that had been howling outside for the previous 2 hours. I was 8.5 months pregnant with our fifth baby, and so I wasn’t sleeping well anyway. I had been laying in bed listening to the wind kick up, wondering when it was going to get better, when instead…it got worse. All of a sudden, I heard a large “C-R-A-C-K!” Immediately, all the power went out…and that’s when the screaming kids began.
Luckily, the crack I had heard was not something that had fallen down and landed on our house, but the winds were so bad that we couldn’t even open our front door without being pummeled by flying debris, so we had to check the situation outside later. (We eventually found out that the winds were up to 88 miles per hour that night.) My children always slept with fans blowing in their rooms to drown out noises. They also had night lights in their rooms to keep the boogie man away. But as soon as that power went out…it was silent…For about 3 seconds! Then they all started crying at once. It was bad enough that they didn’t have the fans going anymore, but not having any light around was torture to them! It was pandemonium!
My husband and I tried to soothe them and huddle them all together as we shimmied our way down the hall to the kitchen to find the flashlight. Digging in the cupboard behind piles of papers, pens, loose bandaids, and my secret stash of chocolate, I finally found the flashlight. My kids would take it and play with it in their “forts” under the bunk bed, so I eventually had to hide it from them so they wouldn’t waste the batteries. When I switched it on, I realized that I had let them play with it one too many times. The batteries were dead. OH, more sobs!!! And of course, we had no extra “C” batteries lying around, so what were we to do? I went cupboard scrounging again and eventually found some matches. I grabbed my lovely decorator candles, you know, the ones that just look pretty and never actually get used, and lit them up.
Needless to say, it wasn’t the easiest night we had ever gone through as a family. Eventually, we got the kids settled down and laid with the little ones until they fell asleep again. We found out later on that we were definitely the lucky ones. Many trees had fallen during the night, some right through our neighbor’s houses! Our power came back on after a few hours. Other people had to wait for weeks!
So, let me give you some advice so you don’t have to go through a situation like mine. BE PREPAED! It doesn’t take much to have a good back up light source in case your power goes out. A flashlight is a wonderful tool; just make sure you have batteries for it that aren’t dead! Keeping the batteries out of the flashlight until you need to use it is a good idea. It helps the batteries to last longer. It’s also an excellent idea to keep a flashlight in your car. If you’ve ever tried to change a tire on the side of the road in the middle of the night, you’ll understand why! You can also purchase candles that last up to 115 hours. They are odorless and smokeless, so they are very safe to use indoors. Another excellent option is to buy some of those neon lightsticks. Kids LOVE those things, and they will last for up to 12 hours without wasting any batteries.
Don’t put off basic preparations until it’s too late. All of those options are very inexpensive and easy to acquire. Make it a priority to get your family prepared, and you won’t end up in pandemonium like we did!
