Quake-icane-ageddon

Pennsylvania has been experiencing some rather unusual weather. I don't have any pictures of the earthquake, well, because NOTHING HAPPENED! I thought a truck was out front making the windows rumble and I didn't think another thought about it until Tim called to say that his co-workers were all panicking.

They had been warning us about the hurricane for a week or so, but Tim had an excellent adventure planned in Nevada with his friends and brother and we thought it would all blow over so he didn't cancel the trip. Things actually threatened to get much more serious here and he feels bad that he abandoned us during a natural disaster, but it's nothing that a pedicure and a new stuffed animal can't fix. So here's how we rode out the storm:

We made a lasagna, bought a bag of apples, locked up the house and went 4 blocks to Ashley, Tommy, Poppy and Mersey's house to get cozy and hope that the two toddlers would mostly keep each other busy. Playing with Poppy's train set was a real hit:



Oly and I slept on a blow up bed in the living room. When I say "sleep" I mostly mean that she giggled with excitement, refused to close her eyes and said, "Mommy, are you sleeping? Do you want me to rub your back? It's morning time!!!! (at 2 am)". The power went out, the basement flooded and the wind was noisy, but other than the tornado warnings everything felt like a fairly run-of-the-mill scary summer storm.



Here's Tommy being warned to NOT wake Oly up the next morning.



Spoiler alert: he did.



We went out to survey the damage:



Here's the Media Grounds Crew's new recruits:



It's possible that they touched every single stick within a 4 block radius.













We walked to the playground at the elementary school to splash in this "serious puddle."



And swing in the fierce wind.



Then after nap we watched....



The PECO guy come and cut some branches that knocked down power lines:



Fun for all ages. The entire neighborhood watched, because, well, what else was there to do?



Power in our county was mostly restored as of yesterday afternoon so we said goodbye to the Duttons and came home to check out our house. There's a small tree down in the back yard, but our tomatoes were in good shape. Some of the basil blew over, except that now that I think about it they might have been that way before the storm.



Piece of cake! I shouldn't make light of it because a lot of New Jersey and Delaware are in bad shape- hopefully the beaches recover. But today is the most beautiful weather I have ever seen and I swear our flower garden looks happier than ever.