Hot and Bothered

We live in the area affected by the storm that hit on Friday night.

The wife had her book club that evening, so I had been ‘exiled’  to the family room to be out of the way.  Throughout the evening, I’d noticed the forecasts by a local group advising that we ought to plug in our devices before the storm hit… and silly me, we didn’t do it.  So, promptly about midnight, the power went out when the storm hit, leaving us in the dark.  When we got up Saturday morning, the power was still out, with little sight of it being restored any time soon.  Because of the heat, we made the decision to pack up and take the kids to sleep at my wife’s parents’ place, where there was electricity and air conditioning.

Now, we’ve had the kids over at my in-laws’ overnight before.  It’s a safe place that the Monster is familiar with, so he’s hardly in a mode where he’s going to give us fights about anything with beyond certain bounds.  So to us, it was a simple win-win scenario – we’d have the kids somewhere cool, and the Monster wouldn’t react badly at the change.  We even worked with his tendencies for the day – at least if one doesn’t mind a day-long litany of “Time to go to gramma and grampa’s house!”.

What we didn’t bear in mind is his rather fixed preferences for night-time accessories (as I discussed in Are You Ready for Beddy-Time?).  In our haste to get out of our slowly heating home, we didn’t grab his blanket or his ladybug nightlight.

This didn’t become apparent until it was, indeed, time for bed.  Getting him upstairs wasn’t a challenge.  He then asked specifically for the blanket and the ladybug – neither of which, of course, we had.  This set him into a fit, which then expanded to encompass the choice of bed in the room (requiring the moving of several large objects to allow him into the bed he preferred), the bedding materials (off went the blanket that did not match his blanket), and finally after some more shrieking and tears, he settled down to sleep.

I suppose what this really teaches us is to update our list for emergency preparedness.  I think if we’d not been in such a hurry, we’d have remembered the items and there’d not have been such a fight… and suffice it to say, I obviously returned the next day with the items in question to ensure we didn’t have a repeat performance.

Of course, it’ll help tonight that he’ll be back in his own bed….

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