C is for chaos

whew! what a weekend. i want to start out by saying that i know my particular situation is not nearly as bad as a lot of people's around here and in the surrounding states. i have friends who still don't have power and others who have a tree on their house. i know a lot of people lost family and friends because of these storms and i am thankful that we are safe and our house is fine. but - i also think that just because my life isn't as crazy and bad as other peoples' lives, doesn't mean that mine isn't crazy. and it was definitely a crazy weekend.

it all started thursday night. or friday morning, technically. the tornado sirens woke me up and since i am terrified of tornados, i jumped out of bed to turn on the tv. only we didn't have any power. so in my still half-way asleep state, i tried the internet. but apparently our modem take power to use. so i grabbed my phone. i have a data phone, but it is so far from a smart phone. so i can access the internet, but no streaming video or anything like that. i finally found a radar on one of the local news websites, but it was about 10 minutes behind, which doesn't really help anything.

so i'm sitting in bed, tornado sirens blaring, hail hitting our window, no power, wondering if i should wake everyone up and cram into a closet. see, in siloam (where i grew up), if the sirens went off, you take cover. here, they go off all the time during storms and as far as i know, since we've lived in this house, there hasn't been a tornado spotted in our direct area. so i decided not to wake everyone up, and just laid there hoping that we didn't blow away.

we didn't. we're all fine. but when we woke up, the power was still off. bummer. so the kids and i came up with something for breakfast and headed over to a friend's house for the morning. on a normal day, this would be fine. but my plan for friday was to clean the house, shop for hiba's birthday party, make a great dinner and be ready for my mom, dad, and sister to come visit. yeah...that didn't happen.

after the morning at leigh ann's (who graciously watched my kids while i at least did the shopping for the birthday party), we went back home for nap time. i laid on the couch and kept thinking that any minute, the power would come back on and we'd be back on track. by about 4 p.m., i decided i needed to come up with a plan b.

jason's parents graciously offered their house to us. so i threw some things in an overnight bag, grabbed the air mattress, called my sister and parents, and headed over. it was our family of four, jason's mom and dad, two younger sibs, his brother brad and sister-in-law katy, my parents, my sister, and my sister's new boyfriendish guy (couldn't ever get a straight answer on that one. but poor guys - if he sticks with her after this introduction to her family, he's a keeper.). it was a little bit of a full house.

jason's family is great. they have a pretty big house and his mom loves having people over. but being there did mean that i was at someone else's house, not in my own space, and me and my plans were at the mercy of an electric company and not in charge of what happens (that's a tough thing for me...). and all of the plans i had in my head for how friday and saturday were going to go were quickly crumbling. plan b turned into plan c, which changed to plan d and so on.

but, at the end of the day, it was fine. we have a house. we had a place to stay. we had a place for my family to stay. we had a fridge to put all of our freshly bought groceries in. hiba had a great time being surrounded by people who love her. we had balloons and dora decorations. and even though we didn't have a schedule, a plan, an event, control - hiba still had a wonderful birthday that i'm sure she will remember fondly