We Survived!

I can honestly say that the ice storm that hit us was quite stressful for me and my family. However we are so thankful for all the luxuries we have in our life......electricity being the main one! So the ice storm hit on a Monday and our power blinked off and on a few times that night, but by Tuesday morning it was GONE! and didn't come back until late Saturday night. If you aren't clear on this it was 5 days and 4 LONG nights! Yes the nights were longer than the days and colder too! However I can honestly say that we bonded as a family and were creative with our time. We played Monopoly, read books, roasted hot dogs and marshmallows in our fireplace, listened to the radio, danced, and of course complained! The hardest thing for the first 2 days and nights was keeping warm. By our 3rd night we had the luxury of having a generator that would run our heat! Still dark but we had heat! Praise God is all I could say! At that point I realized that I could actually live without lights as long as we had heat because I was so tired of being SO cold and having to get up and put wood on the fire to keep us all warm. We generated ALOT of laundry in those 5 days, between us all wearing 2 or 3 layers of clothes and having blankets and pillows everywhere I felt like I did laundry for 5 days after the power came back on! One of the funny things I noticed though is that in those 5 days Carter's vocabulary took off! I guess because we laughed, giggled, and visited so much he just soaked it all in because now he is just talking up a storm! It is so cute! So needless to say we survived, by Saturday my sanity was few and far between but we survived! All in all we survived. We have some damage to our roof, storage shed, fence, gutters, and of course our trees look crazy and broken. Our insurance adjuster came this weekend, so we should hear back from him this week. Luckily my husband is quite handy so he has already been cleaning our yard on his own and will fix most of our damage on his own. I do LOVE having a HANDY husband. One of the many things I love about him! One of the most painful things was all the food we lost, I know it's replaceable it was just hard throwing out 8 garbage bags of perfectly good food. Just thought I would share a few pics of our ice storm. The one that caused me to have a week off work that was not a week off by any means!

Trying to eat as much as we could out of the fridge and freezer! We were desperate and it made for some crazy meals!!!

Lots of clean up done and lots left to do!

Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow

Baby Jackson had a few more bumps along the way, but now he is home! Of course with the ice storm I was without internet for a little over a week and then of course it took me a week to get our house back to normal and get rested up. More on the ice storm later. Jackson continued to be on the antibiotics and they begin teaching Baby Jackson how to eat again. At first he was a little reluctant to the idea, but was warming up to it slowly. After a few days Scott and Christina discussed being transported back to a hospital closer to home while Jackson learned to eat because Children's did not have a room available for them to be with him 24 hours a day, so he had to continue to stay in NICU which they knew he no longer needed. So he was transported by ambulance back to Mercy where he was born. Needless to say Scott and Christina finally felt like they got to be a mommy and daddy! They had him to themselves in their room. Of course we couldn't stay away and we were up at the hospital the day they arrived! We had waited a long time to hold that cutie pie and see him up close without lots of tubes and monitors hooked up to him! Well after only a few nights in the hospital at Mercy, Jackson was eating with no problems, so he was released to go home! What a blessing! The good news is that this whole time we have been praying for Baby Jackson and Baby Harper which were by coincidence were born on the same day and Praise God from whom all Blessings Flow.....they both got to go home on the same day!

This is Jeremy asking Ian if he wanted another baby! Ian of course says yes and daddy says he is CRAZY!