In the dark.

Last Wednesday night, around 11:00 p.m. I was down stairs in my basement, minding my own business, in other words picking up the mess my children had made, when all of the sudden I found myself in the dark. No power. Now a basement is not the best place to be in the dark, because well it's dark to begin with, and then you factor in no lights what so ever and the fact I set my cell phone down somewhere in the basement, so I could not even use that for light, you get the picture on my darkness.....

I felt my way to the stairs and headed up them. I could tell by the darkness of the neighborhood that my being in the dark was not a result of my forgetting to pay the power bill, because my neighbors seemed to be having similar power issues.

I figured Lauren was probably still awake and probably pretty close to freaking out, so I headed toward her bedroom, and sure enough I was met on the stairs by one freaked out nine year old. She informed the the power had gone out, just in case I hadn't figured that out..... We headed toward the laundry room in search of a flash light. I found one working flashlight, (that would be the fault of Mark and Katie, who like to take my flashlights and run down the batteries in the process of destroying the working parts of the flashlight...grrrrrrr.....) and one working "crank" light.

As we pondered what to do in the dark I decided hanging up the wet clothes from the washer seemed like a good option....(FYI, even if he power had been on I still could have hung up my wet clothes, I am very anti dryer, unless its socks and underwear.)

I made Lauren hand crank the light so I could hang up the clothes. This was not her first choice but when given the alternative of returning to her dark bedroom, hand cranking the light didn't seem too bad... About 20 minutes later, just as I was finishing up with the laundry, the power returned, but it still took me and additional 30 minutes to convince Lauren to return to bed.