One Dad, Two Children and No Power

In a world with no power, one man must feed and entertain two small children. What will he do with no television to fall back on? And how, oh how, will he make dinner with no microwave at his disposal?

Such was the case today.

We lost power for a couple of hours. Fortunately for me, it was during our son's nap time. Even more fortunate, he was exhausted and decided to take a marathon nap.  He slept through the whole thing.

It has been dark and rainy all day so when the power went out, the house was fairly dark.  I broke out a couple of battery powered lanterns for light.  Our daughter, who is not afraid of the dark, was just worried about how she would be able to see to play. When she I gave her one of the lanterns to carry around, she found the idea of no power quite enjoyable.

Normally I do not like having gas appliances. We have had numerous small and annoying but not necessarily dangerous gas leaks over the years.  I always felt that if all things are even, I would prefer a house with only electric appliances. Today, however, it was nice to have the gas appliances.

With no power, the microwave is unavailable and if we had electric appliances, there would be no way to cook dinner. As it was, I could use the gas stove to make dinner. I would need to manually light the burner as it has an electric lighter rather than a pilot light but that is not difficult.  So I did what any good father would do in this situation, I grabbed my cell phone and ordered pizza.

As I was talking to the lady at Mario's about our order, the power came back on.  There was no need for the pizza order after all but hey, I already had them on them on the phone so what could I do.  I completed the order.  Our daughter was very excited.  Our son was still asleep.

So I sent our daughter to wake our son in time for the pizza delivery. Pizza arrival is quite the spectacle at our house.  The Beatles got a colder reception at JFK on their first trip to the U.S. than the pizza guy gets at our house.  The delivery guy was laughing so much that I thought he was going to have trouble making change.

So with the arrival of dinner, the crisis was officially passed and I somehow managed to survive the horrible power outage of twenty ten.