Fun Weekend

We had a REAL fun weekend. Friday night a huge windstorm started, with 50 mph winds gusting up to 75 mph. The power was out overnight into Saturday morning. It went out while the boys were having their baths in a windowless bathroom after dark. Our furnace has electric ignition. :)

I had suspected the power would go off for a while, so I'd lit a candle which I brought into the bathroom, and the kids finished their baths by candlelight while Hubby and daughter assembled and lit the oil lamps. I took every blanket we had and put all the kids to bed in one bed to keep them warm. They were like little heads popping up out of a huge sea of blankets, it was really cute. However, when I went to check on them in the middle of the night, I noticed that Knuckles was extra-warm-- feverish. He'd been throwing up for two days but I figured it was just the food allergies. FH is fond of grating cheese, and even before the food allergy diagnosis he'd been oblivious to the fact that if you grate cheese, cheese goes all over the place, not just under the grater. (He used to grate cheese on top of the stove burners, making a huge mess on the stove.)

About midnight we heard a huge, bad noise. FH went out to investigate and found that the soffit from our front porch had hit a car in the next door neighbor's driveway. He retrieved the pieces of soffit, but there was nothing he could do to repair it with the wind blowing like that, so he just brought them inside the house. Fortunately that was the only damage to our house. Other houses in our neighborhood weren't so lucky. Several of them lost siding (some houses lost an entire side of siding and pink house wrap too), and anyone with an east-west fence at the end of a block had damage to their fence. The fenceposts snapped like toothpicks. I'm sure we're missing some shingles too, but we won't be able to tell until the snow melts. Our yard was full of shingles, but if they ended up in our yard they probably aren't ours.

The power came on about 9 am Saturday morning, but we spent a lot of the day sleeping and resting, because we'd gotten very little sleep the night before. Bagel turned up with a fever as well.

A bit before 5pm, Knuckles had a febrile seizure. It was totally unexpected since just a few minutes before I'd taken his temperature and it said 102.1, nowhere near the high fever that's usually associated with febrile seizures. We took him to the doctor and had him checked out just in case, but there didn't appear to be any damage from the seizure, and he was back to his usual self. But that meant we had to have McDonalds for dinner, because I wasn't able to cook while taking Knuckles to the doctor.

Knuckles and Bagel had to stay home from church this morning because of their fevers, so Bagel missed his first day of Sunbeams. It was just as well, since Friday night we were supposed to meet with his new teacher and have a chat with her about Asperger's Syndrome, but had to stay home because of the extreme winds. This gives us a week to arrange another meeting with her.

The homeschooling is going better. Princess started studying fractions. On Friday we went to Salt Lake and put down the $80 to get library cards for the family. The kids had a great time and finally got enough books to satisfy their insatiable reading appetites, although Sonshine complained that the children's books on black holes were too unsophisticated for his taste. Next time we'll see if they have any adult books on black holes.

I'd better sign off now. I'm two days behind on laundry, we're out of clean towels because of all the baths and vomiting, and I still have to prep lessons for tomorrow. I'm having to come up with many more science lessons than I had planned on. Sonshine wants to be on an all-science, all-the-time diet.