Powerless

Remember when I went without power for 3 days?  Yes, you probably do because it's all I could talk about.  Somehow the Preparedness Committee (from our Ward) talked us into going powerless for 72 hours so we could guage our readiness.  They had two things going in their favor 1) I have a total martyr syndrome passed down by an amazing legacy on both sides of my gene pool and 2) the person who asked me lives across the street and could harass me daily.  "Maddy, I see your lights are still on.  Do you need to borrow our camp stove for your experiment??"

We turned off the power on a Friday morning.  I had originally planned to turn it off at night, but the anticipation was just killing me, so finally at 11:30 I just flipped the switch.  That is, I flipped a metaphorical switch because I didn't want to have to reset all the clocks in the house.

No TV, no iTouches (I told the kids we had to save them for an emergency), no water, no heat, no microwave, no fridge, no dishwasher, no vacuum, no washing machine, no flushing the toilet. . . are you following me? 

My kids woke up at 6 am Saturday morning and I yelled, "There are no lights and no electronics, GO BACK TO BED."  They didn't.  I was probably just cranky because I had to get up to go run 17 miles in the freezing cold.  The leather seats in our car were frigid (don't forget your garage door won't go up, so you have to manually open it and park on your driveway) but I was in heaven once the seat warmers kicked in.

I will now share my invaluable lessons, so you will not have to suffer through this experiment of madness:

1. Invest in  disposable paper goods!!  The last thing I wanted to do was wash dishes and I especially didn't want to waste water, so we used paper goods the whole weekend.  I now have a stash with my emergency stuff.

2. You don't have enough flash lights.  I took all my kids to Target to pick out lanterns and flashlights -- everyone got their own special flashlight.  Somehow we still managed to loose a few here and there.  I had a special "flashlight station" where you were suppose to put your flashlight once the sun came up so you could find it when the sun came down.  The kids all ended up playing around with them outside or in the closets.  And luckily we had a million batteries from our Christmas overload.

3. Done with one meal?  Start on the next!!  It took easily an hour to prepare each meal.  We just used our grill for most everything, but the chopping and cooking for everyone on one little pan is rough.  We did eat pretty posh though because we stuck all of our meat from the freezer into a cooler filled with all of the ice from the freezer.  For breakfast I was not venturing out in the cold, so the kids at cold cereal or breakfast bars and fruit.

4. I hate being cold.  That's it.  OK, it's not.  This is where I win the terrible parent award: Sadie came down with a fever of 103 with about 24 hours to go, and I was secretly GLAD she was sick.  Because it meant I got to miss church 48 hours sans shower and also because I turned the heat back on.  I wasn't going to make her any more miserable than necessary.

5. Make it fun!  It gets really depressing just sitting around moaning about not having power, so we planned a lot of fun things.  We went to the park and had a basketball date with friends.  I got out some new games and had bought all the kids fuzzy socks (which I now need to go purchase NEW stuff for the emergency stash).  We roasted s'mores.  I let the kids eat junk food in the dark.  Of course I wasn't happy when I woke up to cheetos all over my carpet the next morning, especially because I couldn't use my vacuum.  We actually ended up eating outside with our fire pit going because there was no temperature difference.

6. Be organized.  Before it starts getting dark you have to get almost everything done for the night --  get PJs out, flashlights found, dinner veggies chopped, house cleaned up. . .  I also had little stations in each bathroom.  We had water bottles for brushing teeth, hand sanitizer for when you went to the bathroom and a bowl to fill the toilet tank with. 

7. Extra! Extra!  Always have more than you need.  I can't imagine if it were a real emergency and a neighbor came over with nothing and I couldn't share.  My family comes first, but I could never let someone suffer, so we decided to make sure we have almost double what we would need so we could still maintain our faith and beliefs even in a time of crisis.

All in all, it wasn't awful and I since I had to suffer through it, I think you should give it a go as well.