Rain, Rain, Go Away -- Please?

It’s been raining here in The Twin Cities for the past ever. My basement barely dried out from the winter thaw when it was flooded again by all the rain.

We’ve had storm after storm, the thundering kind, and one of the dogs is not too happy about them. Night before last the power went out in St. Paul. It was out for about 4 hours. It went out just as it was getting dark outside and since one of my children had used all the flashlights at a recent sleepover and didn’t bother to mention the batteries were dead we had to use candles, cell phone lights and glow sticks I picked up at Walmart for a buck for our upcoming camping trip to Mount Rushmore.

Oh, and the LED Christmas candles* that I had left in the windows upstairs.

Within minutes there was whining about the lack of internet and TV. It didn’t matter that there was still a Nintendo 3DS, the iPad and a smart phone to keep entertained. Apparently those devices aren’t as much fun without the internet and since no one ever bothers to charge anything besides me the fun devices were all low on battery power.

So we tried playing a board game.

Remember those?

Or as my daughter called them bored games because they are so boring.

We played Mastermind but that created more frustration than relaxation.

Eventually the daughter decided that she was going to go to bed because there was nothing to do. It was hot (the air conditioning was out) and we were both getting a bit crabby. Five minutes after going to bed the lights came back on which made it was worthwhile to stay up.

I worry about this generation of kids who don’t know what to do with themselves when there is no power or they are out in the middle of nowhere. My daughter has trouble opening things like jars, bottles and those pull off tabs on some cans like tuna and single serve apple sauce. I try to encourage her to work at it because I fear one day she will be the sole survivor on a deserted island with nothing but cases and cases of bottled water which she can’t open on her own.

We’re going camping soon, across the country, and if I have learned anything from this little experience it’s that I need to be sure to have an electrical hook up where ever we camp.

I hope it stops raining soon