New Years Eve

Well, that was fun!  Not!  As I was typing my last blog post we lost power so I wrapped things up quickly.  I figured if we were going to be without power for any amount of time that a full laptop battery and Netflix can stave off boredom.  I spent about 45 minutes on hold waiting to even report the power outage.  The woman I talked to at Ameren had no idea why there was an outage and consequently wouldn’t give me an estimated time that the power would restored.  I was less than a happy camper.  I had a child who was recovering from walking pneumonia and I had just gotten out of the shower so my hair was wet.  Great time to be without power, right?  Now the one thing we have in spades in this house is flashlights and battery operated lanterns.  Princess Bear started bringing out all of the lanterns until I explained that we just needed one per person.  It would have been a different game if we were going to be up for awhile.  One lantern per person is still enough to read by.  We did debate about whether or not to start a fire but decided we’d ride it out for awhile.  As it turned out I had bundled up too much and wound up kicking off my covers until around 2am.  At that point it was in the upper 40’s in the house and my toes were a bit cold.  The power came back on at 2:30am so all things considered we’d been pretty lucky since there was a bunch of people here in Peoria that had been without power for 4 or 5 days. 

New Years Eve day was spent babysitting my nephews.  Since PB is pretty good at riding herd on them I basically take a book and chill.  After that I had to run to the store to get stuff for dinner since I had volunteered to make a family favorite.  Shrimp in creamed tarragon sauce….yum!  It was a serious madhouse at the grocery store.  As in each checkout lane had a minimum of 5 people with 8 lanes going.  CRAZY!  Now a bit of back-story.  PB has always randomly broken out in hives.  Most of the triggers are unknown.  The things that we do know she is allergic to are cat and dog dander, eggs, oranges, adhesive, lobster and wild berry flavor.  I’ve discussed the fact that she is allergic to lobster but she eats shrimp on a fairly regular basis and has never had a problem with the allergist.  The Dr. said it was just fine for her to eat shrimp in that case.  Well, about 9:30pm on New Years Eve PBs bottom lip BLEW UP.  I mean it was huge!  She was a bit itchy but no other signs or symptoms.  I gave her a full dose of Benadryl and proceeded to stay up and watch the first 2 The Librarian movies.  New Years Day her lip swelled again.  No freaking idea what caused it.  It could have been the shrimp or any number of other things.  The child certainly knows how to get my attention!  New Years Day was spent watching the Rose parade and the last movie in the Librarian trilogy.  Noah Wyle was such a baby when he filmed those!  It also made me totally jones for Season 3 of the Librarians.  I really wish there were more than 10 episodes per season! 

So that’s how we started off the new year here.  It cleaned up 6 hours of space on the DVR which was nice and I got some serious chilling cuddle time in with PB which is always nice.  If it’s an indicator that this year will be laid back I’m ok with that!