Cerneka Family Adventures: The Ice Storm

It started Friday afternoon. We were expecting friends for dinner, so I loaded up the kids and we ran to Wal Mart to pick up a few things. I had heard the forcast, and the ice storm warning that was supposed to last until Sunday night, but the forcast has been wrong before. When we went into Wal Mart, it was chilly and raining, but not slick. The store was a zoo - the canned food aisle looked like a bomb had gone off, the milk was almost all gone, I couldn't find ice melt anywhere. There were people and carts everywhere. School had let our early, and I'm sure a lot of people were leaving work early too. At one point, I heard then page overheard for employees to retrieve more carts from the corrals outside - there were none left in the store and there were customers waiting. All the registers were open, and each one was at least three carts deep. I've never seen our WalMart this insane - not even at Christmas. We got lucky, and moved pretty quickly through the checkout. We left the store about 45 minutes after we entered, and there was an inch of icy slush in the parking lot and it was raining ice. The lot was slick as snot, and I got the kids and the groceries and the kids in the car as quickly as I could. We saw several accidents in the short time it took us to get home. We canceled with our friends and Shannon came home early. He stopped to air up a tire and ended up helping out a teenager who had spun out and crossed the median on her way to work.

On Saturday, it stopped for a bit. We hung out at home, attempted to keep it tidy, and made cookies. It started up again late in the afternoon. We went to Mom and Dad's for dinner (China Palace!) and ended up spending the night. The car was iced over and their road hadn't been graded yet. We decided just to not bother trying to get home in the cold and the dark. We got up the next morning and had breakfast with them, then headed home. It rained pretty much all day, and the temperature hovered just above freezing. The January TEC was taking place this weekend in Jeff at Immaculate Conception, and Shannon and I were doing music for the mass and Hoot on Sunday night. We went and played, and Dad came and helped watch the kids. We headed home about 8:30. As we said goodnight to Dad, Madeleine said, "Night Grandpa. See you in the morning!" We explained to her that while we would see Grandpa soon, it wouldn't be the next morning. Well, evidently she was speaking prophesy, because when we got home, we realized that there were NO lights on in our neighborhood. The huge billboards on the highway were dark, as were the security lights at the storage unit across the street, and there were no lights on in any of the homes. When we pulled up and tried to open the garage door, we discovered that indeed, we had lost power. So I ran inside to grab some diapers and a change of clothes, and to make sure Homer was well fed and all set while Shannon called my parents. We head back to Mom and Dad's to spend the night once again. Shannon ran home in the morning early after he woke up, and the power had returned.

With all of these goings-on this weekend, the biggest news is that Noah rolled over for the first time! He did it reaching for their bizzare blinking toy at my parents' house on Sunday morning. He did it again about an hour ago, trying to eat the case that Madeleine's bristle blocks came in.

Since I started this post yesterday, we've lost power again. I woke up this morning at 0130 to feed Noah and noticed that the clocks were out and the furnance wasn't blowing. I had Shannon set the alarm clock on his phone so I would make it to my transport staff meeting on time, threw a couple more blankets on the bed and the baby and went back to sleep. Shannon was uneasy about the cold (it was 3 degrees when I left for my meeting at 7am) and not having heat, and didn't fall asleep again until the power came back, which was about 0230 judging by the clocks.

Today, it's bright and sunny, and bittterly cold. As I drove home from Columbia after my meeting, my car said it was 8 degrees. The ice is beautiful on the trees and fences, but the back roads are still patchy and the drive to and from Columbia was sketchy at times. I don't have any good ice storm pictures, so I'll post some cute pictures of my kids.

Noah, flush with victory moments after he rolled from back to belly for the first time