A Very Blustery Day

At the beginning of the school year the PTA sent home a note saying that we were supposed to send an emergency kit to the school for each of our kids. There was a whole list of items . . . bottled water, a flashlight, hand warmers, a mylar blanket, canned food, etc. Nate and I complied, but we mocked the idea a bit. We live two minutes away from the school (15 minutes if we walk). We thought it was lame to put together kits that our kids would never need to use. If there was ever an emergency, we could be to the school to pick them up before they really needed to bust into a survival kit. It turns out that they might not have been completely useless after all. We had a crazy windy day on Thursday (gusts of 100 mph) and the power was out at school for about 4 hours. Since Emily’s classroom doesn’t have any windows, her teacher had the kids get the flashlights out of their emergency kits so they could keep working. Emily was glad she had one (even though the batteries died after a couple of hours). I thought about going and picking the kids up early, but I figured it would be a fun memory for them to be at school during a blackout. I’m glad I followed my instincts. When I picked them up after school, they couldn’t stop talking about how much fun they had. Most kids left early, so they got down to 6-10 kids in each of their classes. Emily said that she just kept thinking “Please don’t come and get us Mom. This is too much fun.” Holly pointed out later that their teachers were thinking, “Moms, come and get your kids! This is not so much fun.” :)

We looked at a bunch of photos on KSL.com that night of all the damage throughout the state. There were some crazy pictures. We were glad that the worst thing that happened at our house was the Christmas tree on our front porch blew over and we lost one of the branches. After seeing how bad some people got hit, I felt very blessed (and glad that we had taken apart our trampoline the week before; it wouldn’t have fared so well).