Powerless Sleepovers

Little Man has been asking for a sleep over party since he got his bunk bed . He wanted his best “boy” friend over but he is busy busy on weekends, so he then asked to have his cousin over. She is 8 months older than him and they are the best of friends.

Last night we picked her up and brought her to our house for a fun night. We were going to play, possibly bake some cookies, and play glow stick hide and seek. You would think I would know better than to make plans and expect them to go accordingly.

We pulled into our driveway and hit the button that is built into our van to open the garage door. The door did nothing. I pushed it again, and again the door did nothing. I pushed the button and held it down hoping the garage door would open, and it did not.

We got out of the car and looked around the house. All the windows were dark. I am good at leaving at least one light on when we leave the house, because I do not like coming home to a dark house, so this was odd.

We peeked in the garage and saw our chest freezer light glowing. We could not remember if it had a battery back up or not.

{You may be wondering why we didn’t just go thru the front door this whole time and check breakers and such. Well, we have a toddler lock on the front door that makes it impossible for the kids to open the door when they are on the inside, and I am diligent about making sure that lock is closed when we leave the house too, thus making it harder for someone to break in. Or making it impossible for us to get in if the garage door is not working. I must rethink this plan}

We went to the front door and opened it as far as it would open with the toddler lock on it. I pushed the doorbell and it was not working. I reached in the house to try to turn on the porch lights, but could not reach. I grabbed a stick from outside and finally hit the switch for the lights, but the lights did not turn on. Our power was off, or so I thought.

I looked back in the garage and saw the plug that has its own breaker glowing. The power was on. Or was it. I was over confused at this time.

We called the power company to see if they could tell us if the power was off. They could not.

Stephen remembered he had the original garage door opener in his work, so off to his work we went. We were thinking maybe the opener in the van was not working. Returning home we discovered that the original door opener did not work either.

I called the power company again and reported an outage. I told them we could not get into the house to know for sure if the power was out, but it seems it is. Our neighbors on both sides of us had their outdoor lights on and the street lights were on too but our house was dark and the garage door was not working.

The power company told me they had a crew working 5 miles from our house and they would be out shortly to look at it. If the power worked, we would just have to break a window to get in. Not what we wanted to do but it would get us in the house.

We went next door and our neighbors were nice enough to let us hang out at their house to wait for the power company to come. While we were waiting I got a phone call. The power company had run a test on our meter (smart meter, so it was done electronically) and he was only seeing 50% power coming into our house. It seemed the problem was on their side.

About an hour went by and I finally heard a big truck outside. I went out and it was the power company. They ran tests on the meter and discovered it was a line coming into our house that was bad. They could not fix it that night since it was underground. They set up a temporary fix to give us full power until they could come out on Monday and dig up the line to fix it. This explained why the outlet and chest freezer were glowing, but the door bell was not working.

What is powering our house until Monday.



We were finally in our house! It was now an hour past bedtime though, so all my fun “sleepover” plans went out the window and the kids went straight to bed. They did play in Little Mans room for over an hour before they finally decided to sleep.

They both wanted the top bunk.



This morning I picked up donuts so we could have a fun breakfast. The kids have been playing for hours and although they are tired, I will say Little Mans first sleep over went well!