Icy Adventures!

On Monday night (Dec. 10th) Kansas was hit with a ice-storm. Somewhere between 2 and three inches of rain fell during the last few hours of the day and by midnight, the steadily dropping temperature had frozen everything into a thick sheet of glass. During the early hours on Tuesday morning, we lost all electrical power to the house. Exciting, huh?? With no work on Tuesday for Dad or Seth we spent the day at home, mainly in the kitchen or living room. Our huge stove is run on propane, so by keeping a pot or water cooking all day, we were able to heat part of the downstairs and stay warm even without the furnace. With plenty of hot water, we weren't fairing too badly. When darkness came at 5:30, we couldn't find much to do without electricity but we all sat in the living room while Dad read aloud. By 7:30, half of us were headed to bed, but Dad stayed up to play cards with the younger ones by candlelight.

There was a thick layer of ice over everything!!

Moses and Micah loved seeing how many icicles they could knock off our fences!!

Our power lines; covered with ice but still up!

::Tuesday Snapshots::

Playing risk- why does Esther always win, because seriously, there isn't one game of risk played in this house that Esther doesn't win. It's so sad!!

Silas was prepared for anything and everything with Dad's flashlight and his own little pistol!

With no lights, candles became a highly valued item in this house!!

::Wednesday Snapshots::

Wednesday morning we packed up and headed to Grandma's!! It was a little difficult to make it down our tree-lined road with our tall bus, but thankfully it wasn't damaged. Grandma never lost power during the storm and we are so grateful for her willingness to open up her house to us all!

Wednesday morning was a good time to get started on some special Holiday baking. Grandma pulled out her recipes and we got right to work making Christmas cookies!!

Chocolate covered peanut-butter-balls are a family favorite!! Grandma always makes several batches---- mmmmmm!!

Tabitha has the time-consuming (but mighty tasty!!) job of shaping, then dipping the peanut-butter-balls!!

Silas and Grandma working on puzzles.

Lunch-time--- organized chaos! :)

The ice hurt the trees severely in most places. Wednesday as we girls busied ourselves in the house, the boys spent the day working on the outside cutting down the broken branches and hauling them away.
On Thursday we girls got to have a piece of the action too and we all pitched in together to clean up several yards.

One of Grandma's trees was damaged quite a bit. The boys kept busy for a whole morning on just that one tree!

Seth ran the chainsaw most of the day!

Charity and Tabitha received the logs that had just been sawed and stacked them on the curb to be loaded into the trailer.

Micah hauling the limbs- they were quite heavy with all the ice on them!!

Dad loading the trailer.

Esther and Charity.

Moses unloading the trailer.

Thursday evening Scott arrived at our house with a newly acquired generator. He and Lydia generously offered to let us use it, and Scott hooked it up to power the house. Thank-you, Scott!! So Thursday night we moved back out to the farm where the Ansons moved in with us for the time being, until they got power back at their house.

With the Ansons staying with us on Friday and Saturday, we got to spend extra time cuddling Marcus and cuddl--- no, chasing Paul!! :)

Now it's Tuesday evening, and it's been 7 days since we lost power. On Friday Seth and his boss made a trip down to TX to purchase a large number of generators. They arrived back in Kansas Saturday night and Seth hooked up a generator at the Ansons so they could move back home. Since then both houses ran on generators until they got their power back yesterday morning. We are still running on the generator, which is large enough to supply the majority of our house, except for the water softener, wash machine and dryer, our two chest freezers and the distiller which purifies our drinking water. We've been buying drinking water in Seneca and Grandma is doing our laundry (THANK-YOU, Grandma!!), and the Lord has provided weather cold enough to keep the items in the freezer still frozen, so we're all set; but we are taking donations of brownies and chocolate chip cookies......:) The electric company said that we should have power today or tomorrow so hopefully tomorrow we can quit running the generator!

It's been a exciting week and certainly a change from our normal lives! It's amazing how loosing the power changed so many things. One doesn't realize what they have until they don't have it! We're all have a greatly heightened thankfulness for electricity!!

Praises;

-We've been out on the roads all week from place to place the the Lord has given us all safety and so far nobody has gone in the ditch. We're are grateful for the Lord's guiding hand of protection!

-Grandma has been so helpful-- letting us stay with her, making lunches for us while we were working on the trees around town, lending us her truck so we could come home and do horse and chicken chores, doing our laundry, the list goes on! We're so grateful to the Lord for our Grandma!!

-Scott and Lydia have been so generous letting us use their generator. Without it we'd be living here at home in darkness. We're so thankful for their kindness!!