Murdock Madness: Snow Day

As you may have heard, Chicago got hit by a pretty bad snow storm last week. The night of the storm we were getting all settled in to hunker down for the next few days in the house. We had plenty of food, some logs for the fireplace, and some games to play and movies to watch. Then all of a sudden that picture perfect "snow day" feeling came crashing down.

I was making dinner right before Nick was due home, the baby was sleeping, and even though the winds sounded as though it was going to knock down the house, we were safe and warm. I go to get some pasta out of our cabinet and an almost whole box of opened linguine noodles come crashing to the floor scattering all over the kitchen, the baby wakes up and starts screaming (this kid doesn't wake up gradually, it's all or nothing), THE POWER GOES OUT, my phone starts ringing, and there is a loud knocking at the door and all I can see is a shadowy figure pressed right up against the door through the blinds.

DISASTER! Apparently there was a huge circuit on the street that just exploded, lighting up the whole ski like a lightning storm, blowing out the power to all the townhouses around us. At this very moment Nick was walking to the house trying to get in through the garage because he didn't have a key, but not having any power he had to come to the front door and knock loud enough for me to hear in case I was all the way upstairs. Our friends Matt and Katie who live down the street in a condo saw that our power went out and were calling to see if we were alright and if we wanted to come to their house. We decided to wait and see if the power would come back on, and about 15 minutes later it did. We thought, oh thank goodness, we don't have to go out in this weather. Then about 15 minutes after that the power goes out again. This keeps happening about every 15 minutes and the whole time we are debating if we should go to either Matt and Katie's or to my parents house for the night just in case the power goes off for good and we have no heat. No heat + baby= bad news so we decide after it goes out for the third time that we better head over to my parents condo (about a mile away) and stay there for the night. Although we were so grateful for the offer from Matt and Katie, we didn't feel like it was fair to subject them to a crying baby in the middle of the night, but my parents, no problem :)

Man, packing in a rush with a baby is rough! There is so much junk to take it's ridiculous. So we packed half in the light and half by candlelight and as soon as the power went back on we had to be ready to leave because we needed to be able to open the garage door to get our car out. We were able to do so and brave the streets. It was a slow ride but luckily a short one. On the way there we literally saw a man walking into the wind and he was leaning so far forward, he was pretty much at a 45 degree angle. I've only seen that in movies! We camped at my parents house for the night and watched the storm hit our city from the 48th floor. After talking to some neighbors the next day we found out that the power did go out for most of the night and the house got down to 40 degrees. So glad we left. We also received about 22" of snow.

The next day Nick felt like he had to go into work since we live so close and not many people would be able to get in that day, but there were no cabs or buses on the street so he had to walk to work. What a trooper. Miles and I stayed at my parents house the whole day and here are some pictures from that day.