Beating the Heat, Thunderstorms, and No Power

Tuesday I decided that we would have "Park" day early as the temperatures were supposed to soar through the day. So after breakfast, I gathered water bottles for all 5 kiddos and myself and we headed out for a walk and to play at a local park. We went to Ariel-Foundation Park where we could walk around lakes and the kids could play in the shaded forest area. At 10AM it was already 78 degrees feeling like the mid 80's. By the afternoon, it was close to 92 and felt like 100 degrees. 

We walked around one of the lakes on a path that Lacie and Ethan had never taken. They enjoyed seeing the river on one side and the railroad track bridge that we walk near. Surprisingly the water was kind of low, but it was very still and very clear near the edges so the kids got to see tons of fish. 

After, we spent some time in the "forest" area of the park where the kid ran around and then spent almost an hour playing hide-n-seek. We also watched lots of geese families enjoying the lakes as well. So cute. 

 

On the way home we stopped by the school that my mom is working at handing out the grab-n-go lunches for the kiddos. She was surprised to see us. 

Yesterday, the kids spent the morning building with Legos and then we watched "The Lego Movie: The Second Part." (We didn't do anything outside as the heat index was high and the humidity made it hard to breathe!) 

Not surprisingly the heat and humidity lent itself to some nasty storms last night as a front came through. We had a severe thunderstorm warning in the early evening. The storm came through and wasn't too bad... just heavy rain and a few lightning streaks. Just as it was getting over with they extended our warning until 8:30.

That is when things got interesting. The wind whipped harder than I have ever seen here in our house. I have a window on the side of the house that we can typically only sees tree limbs and leaves out of. Well at one point I could see all the way across the yard to the neighbors house as the limbs were all pushed out of the way.

Needless to say we lost power. Several trees were down on our road (which is a state route) and all over the neighborhood. AEP texted that restoration time was 11:00PM tonight! So I made the decision to head out to Utica with the kids to sleep so that my mom wouldn't be dropping my niece and off to me at 5:15 with no power. When I checked there were 19 different outages in our area!

On a different note, as we were outside looking at the damage, the clouds in the sky after the storms looked so cool! 

Well, late last night I got a text that our power was back on and we came home this morning. The road was still closed to traffic but apparently they had isolate the line to just 5 houses and were able to have our house on. Thank goodness. There are still people out of power and AEP has said that it could be a multi-day restoration event. Craziness. Right now I am exhausted. I got maybe 4 hours sleep last night and so am just chilling today. I have things I need to do but no energy to do them. Thankfully, dinner tonight is heating up frozen chicken tikka masala that I had frozen a couple months ago. Easy peasy. 

How's your Thursday going? Have you had any storms lately?