We had some actual winter weather here mid-February! Looking at the forecast was pretty crazy - highs below freezing ad up to 70 in a 10-day period. It actually ended up getting colder than forecasted and it stayed cold longer than forecasted too.
We knew the storm was coming and had a cozy day on Sunday once we got home from church. We pulled out the candles (since it was Valentine’s Day after all) which turned out to be a little omen to the week ahead!
We woke up Monday morning to snow and ice outside, a cold house, and no power. We think it had gone off around 3am. It stayed off for most of the day, came back on in the evening. I was so grateful and thought we were done with the craziness! I was wrong, but it was really nice to be able to cook dinner and warm up the house a little. I wasn’t letting the kids go out in the snow all day since the house was cooling down fast and they wouldn’t have a way to really warm up. But we spent the day reading a lot, the kids played LEGOs a lot, and we just snuggled up and tried to stay warm.
The next couple of days were a blur of rolling power outages and losing water too. School ended up being cancelled for the whole week, as everyone was in the same situation. Most of the state, actually. One evening while we had power we downloaded some movies on to an iPad so the kids would have something exciting while the power was out.
My parents came down and stayed with us one night, since they had not had power for a long time and their house was super cold. Tyler noticed a leak in a pipe in the attic so we turned off our water until we could get a plumber out to fix it. We brought snow in from outside and filled up the bath tubs so we could have water for flushing the toilets. We had plenty of bottled water for drinking, but it was definitely inconvenient to not be able to do laundry or dishes or shower.
The pic below was not of our house (our leak was in the garage and Tyler caught it quickly so there was no damage) but it is definitely representative of how things went for lots of people across the state. Unfortunately this pic is of Lindsay and Kenny’s house! They had a pipe burst and flood their primary bedroom. Luckily they were able to pull up and dry out the carpet, but had to replace the sheet rock and insulation in the wall and ceiling.
We got used to the rolling power outages and were grateful that it was a few hours on, a few hours off, so our house stayed semi-warm and the food in our freezer was mostly fine. I took this pic to remember praying that the power would stay on while these muffins were cooking. Funny thing to pray for but it was necessary!
This was the mountain of dishes I had waiting for me when we finally got our water back on.
It’s funny the things we take for granted, and how quickly things change! We had quite the week, but overall were totally fine and were reminded of how much we have to be grateful for. We were also reminded how grateful we are to live in Houston, where winter weather like that is highly unusual!
