Our Beautiful Princess: We survived the blizzard!

W-O-W! I have grown up in Minnesota all my life, survived through many different kinds of snow storms, on many occasions, but our Thursday night blizzard was the scariest I can ever remember...

Erik and I put Maida to bed around 9:00 on Thursday night. After we get her in bed, we usually stay up and play games or watch tv. This particular night we decided to play a few games. At 2:00am, Erik had just finished kicking my butt at Hand & Foot and we decided to get some sleep. I glanced outside and noticed that there was nothing but a strong wind coming off of the lake, and remember thinking, "This is all you've got?! Ha! Where's all the snow they predicted?!"

4:00am I woke up to the wind beating against our window, what sounded like hail hitting the screen, and Maida SCREAMING. I sat up, noticing that I couldn't hear her crying in the monitor. Then I jumped out of bed, glanced at the nightstand to see why the monitor wasn't working and also to see what time it was. Both the monitor and the clock were off. Ah! I quickly gathered that the electricity was off and thought, "Oh no, how long has Maida been screaming? What if something is really wrong?" I ran into her room, tripping and stumbling over everything on the way.

The wind coming off the lake was very strong and howling like crazy. I felt like Maida's bedroom window was going to blow in and when I looked out it, all I could see was a sheet of white. The big pine tree next to her window was actually bent over and scratching on the window, making a horrible fingernails-on-the-chalkboard sound. It was lightning, thundering, raining, and snowing all at the same time. Poor Maida was scared to death. When I picked her up, I thought that she was sweating because she was all wet, but it was freezing in the house (no electricity = no heat) and after taking a look at her eyes, I could tell that she had been crying for a while and she was wet from tears. Not wanting to leave her alone in her room, I brought her into our bedroom to sleep with us. She was so excited when she realized that she was gonna sleep with mom and dad. She kept laughing and clapping her hands!

20 minutes after I finally got her to sleep, I realized that I was not going to get any sleep between Maida and Erik. Maida was tossing and turning on one side, Erik on the other. So, I decided to wake Erik up to have him help me make the extra crib in our room. Surprisingly he was easy to wake up and helped me make the crib, but in the process woke Maida up too. I finally got her back to sleep and in the extra crib at about 6:00 and at 7:00 she decided that it was time to get up and play.

By the time we got up and looked outside, about 12 inches of snow had accumulated and it was still coming down, however the wind was whipping it in all directions, making grass visible in some parts of our yard, and other parts of the yard sporting snow drifts higher than my head!

We were without power all day, which made for an interesting time, but we stayed busy playing with Maida! We bundled her up and took her over to visit the neighbors! She loved being outside in the blizzard! We also all took naps in the afternoon, which felt wonderful. Erik wasn't able to make it to drill this weekend because of the storm, so he was able to do a little homework (and I was thankful to have him home with us).

Our electricity finally came back on last night and it's a good thing because if it didn't come on within the hour, Erik and I were going to have to pack up everything in our fridge/freezer and take it outside to keep it frozen. It was also a good thing because we were FREEZING cold with no heat! If the electricity didn't come on by bedtime, our neighbors were going to set up their portable heated fishhouse in the backyard and sleep in that! Anyway, we survived the storm and today it's beautiful and sunny. Most of the snow should melt and by Monday we're supposed to be up to 40 degrees again!

Here are some pictures, some from yesterday and some from the day before when Erik came home from the clinic...

A couple days ago...