What was that?

It's 8:40 PM. Naturally it's pretty dark outside. We just finished having FHE. Probably the best FHE ever! We watched a "Little People" movie--Karen sent a DVD that has 6 short clips on it. We watched the one about the frog. Rachel thought it was great; she kept bouncing up and down.

After we watched the movie we played leapfrog. And then we talked about nursery.

For some reason, now that Rachel is basically old enough to go to nursery (8 days until her 18 month birthday) she is petrified of it. Up until a few weeks ago she loved nursery. She's been going for months!

I sat in nursery with her for a little while last week but she ended up coming to primary with me. So today we reviewed the lesson that she had in nursery. It was about prayers. Then we talked about how fun nursery is and asked her if she wanted to go this week. She said she did. Here's hoping...

Anyway, after scriptures, prayers, silly tickle fights, tooth brushing, hugs, and kisses, Rachel had popcorn. This just means that we sing "Popcorn Popping" and put her to bed. She loves popcorn. Sometimes.

With Rachel tucked snuggly in bed, Andrew and I lazed around for a few minutes until we thought she was asleep. Then we went into the kitchen to clean up from dinner.

I had just gotten out a plastic bag to put the cheese into when two things happened at once: a huge cracking sound and a power outage.

I screamed.

That huge cracking noise? Yeah, it happened right behind my head. I was pretty sure something terrible had happened. I've never heard a gunshot, but maybe that was one. Or maybe Andrew fell and hit his head on something. My imagination was going 100 miles an hour.

"What was that?" I asked, groping around in the dark to find a counter top or Andrew or an assailant or something. Anything. I needed more than the plastic bag I was holding onto.

"I just snapped the pizza thing!" Andrew said.

We had half-homemade pizza for dinner. We bought the crust from Metro Market and it happened to come on a Styrofoam tray that made an amazingly loud noise when broken in half.

I suppose the fear was compounded by being plunged into darkness at the exact moment Andrew decided to break the tray right above my head.

Our cell phone beeped, drawing me out of my panic attack.

I found Andrew and held onto his shirt and we bumbled our way out of the kitchen. Once we were in the hallway we could use the light from our laptop screens to guide us into the living room (thank goodness for laptops!) where Andrew found the flashlight sitting on his desk.

We spent the next ten minutes searching for the candles that we had gotten for moments just like this. The only problem is that electricity has been so stable lately that we forgot where we put them.

Finally we found them, and started lighting them.

The Schillings, who had texted us, came to borrow a can of evaporated milk. They were in the pharmacy down the street when the power went out and found their way to our house and up our stairwell in the dark. Kudos to them.

We talked for a few minutes about all the fun things you can do when the power is out: ghost stories, games, shadow puppets on the wall, etc. A good old fashioned power outage was beginning to sound like a lot of fun. But just when Andrew was lighting the sixth candle the power came back on.

Our apartment hummed back to life. The fridge started clicking. The lights turned on. Even our microwave started running--we had just thrown in a bag of popcorn two seconds before the power went out.

So I guess we'll just watch a movie together as we'd planned to before the power went out. But that sounds a little unadventurous now.

Maybe we'll take a break from electronics and do that shadow puppet show on the wall after all.