Superstorm Sandy and MMH

We had quite an interesting couple of weeks toward the end of October 2012.  First, we had a small house fire on Wednesday followed by a hurricane on Monday and Tuesday, October 29-30.

This is our front and back yard on the 31st.  There were A LOT of leaves and a few branches.

Our back yard has a lot of trees behind it and three trees fell, but all of them fell parallel to our back fence.  Whew!  You can see two of the trees in this picture.

This was an email that I sent to my relatives on the Saturday after the hurricane:

We are doing fine.  We lost power on Monday night and it came back on Thursday night.

During that time, our gas and water were fine, so we had hot water (since our hot water heater runs on gas) and we could use our gas stovetop.  We were using our power generator for a few hours twice a day to keep our refrigerator cold.  Our oven needs electricity to turn on - it's a really old wall oven that has an ignitor "light" that uses electricity to get really hot and the gas won't turn on until the ignitor reaches a certain temperature, as a safety issue.  Our furnace also needs both gas and electric, but the weather was pretty mlld Tuesday and Wednesday, so we were pretty comfortable.  It got cold Wednesday night, so we all bundled up with a bunch of blankets.  The twins slept with Michael and me and Eliza, Timmy, and Katie slept together on the pull-out couch in the family room.  We ran the generator most of the day on Thursday to use a little space heater in the family room.

Some places still are out of power, most of the town where Aaron and Whitney live, for instance.  They have a gas fireplace in their family room and now that our power is on, we gave them our generator so that they can run their refrigerator.

Only some stores and some gas stations have power.  The stores that are open are completely out of perishables (refrigerator food like dairy and eggs, produce, bread, and a lot of frozen goods) and some of the gas stations are running out of gas.  The gas stations have lines that take over an hour to wait.  A lot of people are filling up gas containers too (which are also sold out at the stores).  At this point, Michael and I both have 3/4 tank of gas in our cars and an extra 6 gallons in our containers.  Michael has gone early in the morning - about 5:30 a.m. and has only waited about 45 minutes for gas.  We just heard on the radio that they are going to start gas rationing - if the end of your car license plate ends in an odd number, get gas on an odd numbered day...

The kids have had the entire week off of school because of power outages.  I'm hoping they go back to school on Monday.  The schools build in 3 "snow days" for any emergency closings.  If they don't use them, like last year, they give them 3 days off - last year, they got an extra day before Good Friday, which they had off, and a day before and after Memorial Day.  If they use more than the 3 days, then they start taking away from spring break and other days off.

We have plenty of food for the time being and we have hopes that things will get back to "normal" soon.  We didn't have any of the flooding that others were affected by near the shore.  There wasn't a lot of rain; most of the flooding and devastation happened because of the wind creating severe waves near the shore.

It's interesting re-reading my email.  It was a challenging time, but I felt like we learned a lot from it.  We certainly weren't as negatively affected as many other people were.

We had Aaron and Whitney's family over on Tuesday evening - I think they were getting stir crazy and needed to put some of their food in our fridge.  We used some of their chicken to make chicken tostadas.  It was fun having their company and nice to have some "normal" food during that time.  We were very grateful to have a generator (and gas to make it run), since that kept our food from going bad.  We also were able to plug a lamp into the generator on that night... The next night we were using candles.  Lots of candles.  What a huge difference!

Most of the weekends following the hurricane until almost Christmas, Michael, Jonathon, and Christian, went out helping with the Mormon Helping Hands.  Once we found out that Nathaniel was okay to go too, he started going out with them.  I stayed home with the younger kids.  It was really great for them to be able to help those who had lost so much.

On Thanksgiving weekend, some people from a stake in Virginia came up to help us out and Michael and I went to the church on Saturday morning to help serve them breakfast.  It was wonderful to have the extra hands!

Here are some pictures of Michael and the boys serving with Mormon Helping Hands (and one of me in the kitchen):

Also, here is a video that someone made of the clean-up effort that happened in New York.  It was very similar to the kind of work that went on here.

Closet Fire - October 24, 2012

On Wednesday evening, October 24, at about 6:00, we (the whole family and Ashleigh, but not Michael) were in the living room, finishing homework, when Christian went downstairs to get ready to go to young men's and smelled smoke.  He almost ignored it, but decided to investigate and found a small fire in our utility closet.  He called to me and I went running down to see that it was in the corner, not near our water heater or furnace.  It was about two feet high and I kind of panicked and pulled a mop that was on fire out of the closet so that I could smother it.  Our mop handle is made of metal with a plastic coating and the only thing I had quickly accessible was a bag of vacuum cleaner bags.  When I tried to smother it with them, the melted plastic from the mop splashed on my hand.  I realized that wasn't such a good idea, so I stepped back and looked at the quickly growing fire and immediately something inside the closet exploded.  I believe it was an aerosol can of insect repellant.

By now, the fire was about 5 feet high and I was thinking that if we didn't extinguish it quickly, we would have to evacuate.  Just then, Jonathon handed Nathaniel our fire extinguisher, who handed it to me.  I had some trouble locating the pin and just started pulling everything off of the nozzle area that would come off.  It only took seconds (it felt like minutes) and I was able to put the fire out.  From the time that Christian found the fire to the time that it was out was about 30 seconds.

I think we were all in shock - I know I was certainly not thinking clearly - when Jonathon suggested that we go outside.  The house was filled with smoke and a burning plastic smell, and a fog of chemicals from the fire extinguisher.  We all went out to sit on the front lawn and left the door open to air out the house and I called Michael.  After he checked to be sure that we were all okay, he said that nobody was going to mutual or activity days that night.  Christian and I went back inside and opened all the windows in the house and went back outside for another 5 minutes.  By then, the house was pretty much aired out and we were able to start thinking rationally.  Michael got home pretty soon after that with some pizza for dinner.  We ate and then he and the oldest boys cleaned up the family room, which had a fine powder on absolutely everything!

Michael looked up online what to do about hand burns and decided that I fit the criteria for going to the emergency room since the burns were big enough and they were on my hand.  So we headed to the ER once everything had settled down and Whitney had picked up Ashleigh.  By then it was getting kind of late, so it wasn't very busy in the ER.  I guess the nurses were kind of bored because once I had told my nurse that we had a small fire plus an small explosion, I had quite a few people around me checking me out.  I told the doctor that my hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes were singed, and he added that my nose hairs were too!  Lovely.

Once everything had settled down, the nurse gave me a Percocet for the pain since she had to clean off all the melted plastic from my hand.  It didn't hurt too bad until the very end.  There was some quite stubborn plastic still on my hand that she had to really scrub to remove.  All in all, she was very gentle and really nice.  I felt fine until we were heading home in the car.  Not only did my hand start hurting, but I started feeling a little loopy.  I think that Percocet is the strongest medicine I've ever taken.

The next day, I went to my hairstylist and got my hair cut so that it wouldn't look so weird.  She did a great job with it as usual.  The only parts of my hair that got singed were my bangs and the sides in the front.  When I got my hair cut, the singed areas by my bangs were about a quarter inch long and they are now about 2 1/2 inches long.

For a few days, I felt like I had a sunburn on my face.  Mostly just under my nose, my lips, and my forehead.

I wasn't thinking at all about pictures, so I didn't get any pictures of the closet, the family room or my hair.  Whitney came over the next day and took a picture of my hand.  She helped me re-bandage my hand since I had to change the dressing every day and it was difficult to do by myself.

I had to go to the burn center on Friday and have them check it out.  They gave me some cool, stretchy, loosely-knit sleeves that I could cut a hole for my thumb and it held all the dressings on.  The doctor cut all the blisters so that I wouldn't pop them at the wrong time.  It was a lot easier to do things because I wasn't worried about popping them anymore.  My hand only seemed to bother me when I got it around anything hot.

I had called my mom that night (she was in Washington visiting my sister) because I knew that she would want to hear about it right away and from me.  She then called my visiting teacher and she arranged some meals to be brought to us.  I was a little embarrassed at first because I felt like we were okay and that if I didn't cook, the kids could - I always worry about causing other people more work that are already busy with their own lives.  But as I thought about it, I realized that it was good for my children to get some service and be appreciative of that and I know that the Lord would bless those that help us.  I was especially grateful for the meals the next week when I actually did cook and realized how uncomfortable and difficult it was.  We also heated up some of the leftovers while our power was out after Hurricane Sandy.

My hand healed pretty quickly and was pretty much back to normal in a little over two weeks.  This is what it looked like 12 days after the fire.

Within a few days all the scabs and dead skin had fallen off and you couldn't even tell that I had been burned.

I feel that we were so blessed throughout this experience and I think it has increased our faith that God is watching over us.  Here are some examples:

1. If the fire had started 30 minutes later, we would've been gone.
2. Christian followed a prompting from the Spirit to find out where the smoke smell was coming from.
3. Jonathon felt prompted to get the fire extinguisher even before Christian found the fire, so he was quick to go and get it.
4. The fire was well away from the water heater and furnace.
5. I stepped back from the fire (I was about 2 feet from it at first and after I stepped back I was about 5 feet from it) just before the can exploded.
6. All of the children protected by the closet wall from the explosion.
7. None of us got smoke inhalation.
8. I healed very quickly and have no scars.
9. Someone gave us a set of fire extinguishers for our wedding and this is the first time I've had to use them.

Re-commitment

A few months ago, our family computer died.  Luckily, I had backed everything up on the internet.  Unfortunately, the dates on almost all of our photos are wrong.  The good thing is that I have some of the information on my blog.  The bad thing is that I haven't updated it in so long that I am missing a lot of the dates...

So, I am determined to update a lot more often, especially since both sets of parents are far away now.  So, mom and dad, you will be pleased to know that I will be posting pictures and stories again.  I've really missed a lot of time, but I promise to make it up!

Here's some pictures that we took a couple of weeks ago: