Young Life in an Old Town: Unplugged and (Slightly) Unhinged

What would you do if your child was happily tucked away at her grandparents’ house 200 miles from home and directly in the path of a monster hurricane? Run to her, stay home, or demand that she be delivered to your door? Sophia was in the midst of a two-week stay with her grandparents, which was an arrangement that I made with mixed feelings, as detailed .

To break up the time and hopefully keep any homesickness at bay, I had planned to go up for a long weekend after her first week away from home. Unfortunately Hurricane Irene also decided to visit that same weekend.

When the forecast began to look ominous for Alexandria and for New Jersey, I debated about what to do. Should Sophia come back home? Should I stay in Alexandria and batten down the hatches while my in-laws did the same on their end? Was travelling to the Jersey shore completely ridiculous? There wouldn’t be much of a story if I had answered “yes” to any of these questions.

I decided to go take the train up to Jersey last Friday with blind faith that I would be able to get back home on Monday, and be in my office by Tuesday morning. I reasoned that if my in-laws were evacuated or experienced any damage to their house or lost power, I would want to be there to help out – and to help them manage my four year old.

I spent Saturday afternoon following the storm as it hit DC. I was glued to Twitter and in touch with my husband who stayed behind to hold down the fort at our house in Old Town. We lost power for about 72 hours in New Jersey but, for the most part, my in-laws’ home was relatively untouched by the storm.

Sophia took the power outage in stride. We played cards – lots and lots of cards. We made a solar system out of construction paper and tape (this was a little dicey because without the Internet I couldn’t look up the answers to her questions. What’s the weather like on Saturn? And how long would it take to get there?). I think it’s safe to say that of the four of us under one roof, I “suffered” the most without electricity.

Between email, Twitter, texting, blogging and writing for Patch, I’m a little too “connected.” I know that I need to find a way to detach myself from technology more often, but going cold turkey after the storm was really hard for me. I kept going over to my phone – which was totally black and powerless (nope, I don’t have a car charger) -and looking at it wistfully, wondering what was going on in the world.

By Tuesday morning, the power was back and I thought I was booked on Amtrak back to D.C. It turned out that there were no trains running North of Philadelphia and, filled with a sense of obligation to get back to work, I rented a car and drove all the way home. You might think that Sophia would have been ready to come with me after three days with no power, but she nearly pushed me out the door while asking her grandparents if it was safe to go back to the boardwalk yet.

What have I learned from all of this? Mother Nature doesn’t really care if you need to be back at work on Tuesday, my independent child doesn’t really miss me as much as I think she does, my in-laws are far calmer in a weather related state of emergency that I am, and I might just have a tiny crush on Luke Russert.