365: Day 49- Lights Out

2/18/13: S&Z were playing in their room shortly before bedtime last night when the power went out. Unfortunately I was in the kitchen when it happened so they were totally traumatized as soon as we were plunged into darkness. They immediately started screaming so I grabbed my phone and opened up the Flashlight app as quickly as I could so that I could corral them and get us to mine & Derek's bedroom where the real flashlights are kept. Once I got them settled on our bed I grabbed the Pooh bears, a few books, candles, and a box of crackers. I quickly worked on figuring out if the power outage was just in our apartment, our building, or our block. I called our landlord who called NStar on our behalf. 

It was interesting to see how each of the kids dealt with this stressful circumstance. Whenever I needed to leave the bedroom to do something, Silas wanted to hold the flashlight and be right by my side. He refused to stay in the bedroom. Zoe, on the other hand, found navigating around the house in the dark very stressful so she preferred to stay hunkered down on our bed with Pooh and the lantern. She was also exhausted because it was so close to bedtime, and I suspect her autonomic nervous system completely flooded out her usual coping mechanisms. She would periodically call after us, "you're coming back?". After we got situated we read books and snuggled on the bed, and the lights came back on after about 45 minutes.

The first thing they talked about when they woke up both this morning and from nap today was the power outage. I tried to use this situation as a learning opportunity - we talked about how although they were scared, we were together, and how we used our problem solving skills to figure out how to make things manageable until the lights came back on...

Prior to the power outage, this was going to be my picture of the day. Silas was being a misanthrope at bedtime and he ended up in an extended timeout. After the usual 3-4 minutes in timeout I asked him if he was ready to cooperate with the bedtime routine and get washed up. Several times he replied, "NO, I WON'T!". He announced several times that he was going to flush me down the drain. 

After about 10 minutes of this, he sweetly said, "I'm ready now!". As soon as I let him out of timeout he went happily running to the bathroom where he brushed his teeth and washed his face and hands without any prompting. A few minutes later we lost power...