I hadn't been paying attention to the weather so I had no idea a snow storm was coming yesterday.  I stay at home, so I don't have to worry about a commute, and since it's winter I already know it's going to be cold every day*.  Six to eight inches isn't an unheard of amount.  In fact it's rather puny compared to the snow fall of last year.  But this snow was very, very wet.  And it came down fast.  I heard the roads were a nightmare.

After the kids were in bed and the house was quiet (a relative term since the kids don't knock off right away), Curtis and I listened to the quiet outside.  We could hear the distant (and not so distant) cracks and pops of branches breaking.  And we could see lightning.  It was both eerie and exciting.  Until the power went off.  That took the charm away real fast.

With no power, there's no heat.  And we have little boys who are little enough that they wiggle around in their sleep, get out from under their covers and can't put the covers back on.  We found all the extra blankets we had (which weren't a lot) and put an extra blanket on each child.  I guess it worked since no one woke us up in the night complaining of being too cold.  Our thermostat, which kept working thanks to a battery, let us know the temperature was in the 50s this morning in our house.  So we huddled around our fireplace until lunch time when the power came back on.  Ahh! Glorious heat.  I'm so thankful.

This is what we found this morning:

Our willow tree dropped a whole bunch of branches in our backyard.

The red maple by the street thankfully dropped it's branch on the sidewalk and not on our car.  It's hard to see how big this branch is from the picture.  Curtis thinks the branch is about 11 feet long...err tall...or something.  The county says they might be able to get to it in a couple weeks....

There are other big branches down in our neighborhood, but I didn't venture out to get good pictures of them.  Curtis says there are large branches blocking several different roads in our neighborhood.

*I can't wait for spring.  I'm already dreaming about the bulbs I planted in the fall.