This has been a crazy week. Tuesday morning, we all went to school and work as normal... (Except for Michael who took his truck to the shop to be worked on...he wasn't going to work that day.) We knew there was a chance we'd get some snow that afternoon, but the chance for our area wasn't that great - or at least not that much snow... The car place didn't have the parts to finish what the needed to do, so Michael left his truck there and they gave him a ride home...thinking we'd get it back that night. Around 11:00 all of the local schools decided to close early - at noon. I wasn't in a rush to leave work at that point because I knew Michael would be here to get her off the bus. Then our daycare decides to close at 4:00... okay, so I am going to have to leave by 3:00...that's fine. Then things start changing...the weather is getting heavier and heavier and traffic all over is starting to get bad. Then my daycare changes their closing time to 2:00 instead of 4:00. I was trying to get out of my office but was trying to finish something there at the same time. I was freaking out. I finally left my office at 12:45 - an hour and 15 minutes before they closed. Normally it takes me about 40-45 minutes in the evening traffic to get there...
This was not a normal day at all. It was taking me about 25 minutes to get to each exit... I didn't make it to his school until 3:30 - over 2.5 hours since I left work. The whole city left work at about the same time and the roads were getting really bad all over. It was ridiculous. I'm sure you've seen stuff on it on the news...so I won't go into that many details here. I left his school and started heading home. That wasn't happening either. We live about 12-15 minutes from the school and at 5:00 I was still 5 miles from home and couldn't get there. Jackson was getting very upset about being in the car for so long... We finally stopped at Publix for me to grab a sandwich and a bottle of water (I never ate lunch since I left work early)... we get back in the car and I was going to try a different way (because the road I was on was shut down) and Michael called and said for me to go to a friend's house that lived right by the Publix. This is the family of a little girl that Rachel went to Kids R Kids with - I know them but we're not all that close or anything... But I couldn't get home - I might could have sat there with all the other people in the area trying to get up the hills on these roads and have my van spin out or roll back down and have other people try to push me... or I could have abandoned the van and walked the rest of the miles home - which thousands of people around the city did that night... But I couldn't do those things because I had Jackson with me... So, we stopped at their house... Oh, I did go back into that Publix and buy pull-ups and a toothbrush for us... We had nothing with us to spend the night away from home. Only the clothes on our backs.
They were very welcoming and I was so grateful. It was a little odd but Jackson handled it like a champ. He played with the little girl and did so much better than I could have imagined. We kept reading other people's stories on Facebook all night... So many people didn't make it home or slept in their cars or in restaurants or hotels, etc. It was all so crazy. Also, I'm SO thankful that Michael didn't go to work that day. Had he gone to work, he would have been behind me on the roads, and neither of us would have made it home to be there for Rachel. We probably wouldn't have made it home at all that night. (Oh, many kids didn't even make it home that night...there were quite a few that spent the night at their schools and got home the next day... Even four kids at our daycare were never picked up until the next morning - it was that bad.)
I won't go into all of the details, I know this is long enough, but around 1:30 on Wednesday, we attempted to leave. We had to wait on the sun to be out long enough to melt a little bit of the ice... I was close by James, our friend, who was stuck at his brother's house... so we went that direction and picked him up. He had walked two miles from their house to the main road where I was... He hopped in and we headed towards our house. It took about 55 minutes to go maybe 5 miles or so... But we made it! I was so excited to see Rachel and Michael. The first of our snow days was spent apart and I didn't like it. But we were finally there. It could have been worse and I'm very grateful to the Peel's for opening their house to us that night!
Jackson and I played outside at their house for a little bit yesterday morning...this was Jackson's first real experience with snow...the last time it snowed here was three years ago and he was only six months old.
I had his hat, coat and gloves with me...but we borrowed some of their clothes for the rest of his outside outfit...
He really enjoyed it for awhile!
Then when we got home, we all went back outside and played together... finally!
He really liked it when daddy pulled him back up the hill!
And today they went back out for an hour or so this morning... couldn't really do any sledding today b/c the ice on the road had mostly melted... but they did build this little snowman. Jackson wouldn't take a picture with it though...
And schools are closed again tomorrow... But Jackson's school is open so he's going there and Rachel's after-school people are opening at 10:00... So, I'll take her over at that time and then head into work.
Like I said, it's been a very crazy week.
