Refugees

Last night, I woke up (OK - Helen woke up, which woke me up) around 2:00 and the power was out. I have over 700 ounces of breastmilk stored in my freezer so that I don't have to pump as much when I head back to work. It would be a huge tragedy, in my book, if this milk was lost. So I plodded upstairs, fed Helen, and told Ed "the power is out" and he knew the appropriate response on his part was to get out of bed and call the power company and alert them to this crisis. Strangely, there is no auto response indicating what number on the phone to press if you are worried about your breastmilk thawing. Hmmm...perhaps a letter to customer service is in order.

In any case, Ed made the call. The power company already knew about the outage. Helen woke up, oh, I don't know, every 10 minutes last night, so Ed went to work super early. Connor came in to bed around 6:30 and I told him that our lights were not working and that he could hunker down under the covers with me if he wanted while we waited for the sun to light our house. He was game for a while, and then he wandered out to the sitting room while I fed Helen. By this time, it was getting pretty cold in the house.

Connor ordered "eggy bread" for breakfast, which is something I could fix without electricity (thank you, gas stove) and about halfway through I had Helen napping with a stocking cap on and Connor put on a fleece. Finally, I gave up and called my friend and we headed to her house for the morning. Her nanny was kind enough to let Connor tag along on a prearranged outing and Helen was able to nap peacefully.

Ed had drug the deep freeze outside so the milk suffered no ill effects. I wonder how many days I will wake up to Connor saying "do you remember when we had no lights and we had to go to Zoe's house?". Connor was definitely worried about the situation - though he seemed happy enough with the answer that "the guys" were going to fix everything. Helen seemed not to notice that anything was wrong.


Elaine