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At last our trusty steed has been put back into its barn where hopefully it'll rest for quite sometime before we need him again. Not that we had it bad at all because we didn't.. The full house transfer switch really paid off! We were living large and other than the cable/internet being out, it allowed us not to be affected at all by the power outage, running water, warm showers, heat.. glorious! Although about 42 hours or so of no power OR cable was nothing compared to the '08 ice storm when we were all holed up pretty much in one room in front of the pellet stove at Grammy and Grampy Chirco's for 5 days. That... ahem.. interesting event (not the company, but the close quarters and no warm water for showers!!) was what prompted this whole upgrade/home improvement activity this past fall! It was however rewarding that we got to use it so soon after purchasing it! Not like the first year we moved in when we had 3 GIANT snow storms before we even hit Christmas, shovelled them all, decided it was the worst and bought a snow blower, then it didn't snow much more than an inch at a time the rest of the winter! But I digress.... as usual.

Friday night we had a date with the Sevins for Chinese food before we knew the power would be out. It worked out well since we probably would have had to order out anyway great foresight Kelly!! It was delicious! And the kids played together very well, hardly hearing a peep from them!

With no power/internet Rob broke out the craft book Santa brought us this winter Friday while I was at work. This is Caden's TV.. and obviously with no cable, Brendan was the most interesting thing on TV for the evening!

It was a great evening with friends until...

... 3:15 AM when our Carbon Monoxide alarms started going off. We weren't quite sure what to do... tried calling the non-emergency numbers for the fire and police department but got "all circuits are busy" and busy signals.. so we ended up calling the Fire emergency line. The LFD responded promptly, the levels were high enough that we had to evacuate the sleeping children to the car outside in the driveway and they then ventilated our house with all the windows open and a crazy powerful fan. In the end it turned out the generator was exhausting a little too close to the house, so the CO level slowly rose throughout the day and night.. nothing too serious, and the levels while necessary to evacuate were not deadly at the time. But I am VERY happy we had those CO detectors! The firefighters were super nice, the boys were very excited by the whole thing. When we woke them up and brought them downstairs to bundle up and they saw the firetruck out the window they were beyond impressed! The firefighters told the boys to come visit the station, so we'll definitely have to take them down to see their home base!

Three Cheers for the LFD!!

Surprisingly the kids went back to bed easily even though it was about 4:30 when all was said and done and safe to go back to bed. Rob and I both figured they'd be up for the day!