Oh Snow! (mid-February)

I missed all the "excitement" while I was at Sarah's house after Kylie was born.  One day it was Monday the 14th, a normal day other than Valentine's Day.  Everyone went to bed as usual, but the wind had kicked up earlier and it was raining pretty hard.  Traci said she woke up in the early AM to Emma crying for the second time.  This time she noticed that her face felt cold, and then she realized the heater was off, so she had Eli check the breaker.  It wouldn't flip so he went in the house to see if they'd flipped off our breaker...as soon as he opened the door to their 5th wheel he was greeted by about half a foot of snow.  He soon realized there was no power.  The valley and surrounding areas had been hit overnight by some very very unusually heavy snow and it not only snapped trees and limbs that fell on power lines but it also snapped a few power poles.  It was a mess.  The power company worked all day and was unable to restore the power so many spent a cold dark night and another day--about 40 hours without power!  I wasn't sorry I missed out on that!  For some it even took a week to get their power back.
Traci and Eli spent the night at my parents because they had a woodstove.  They cooked meals on a propane heater.  Tom toughed it out at our house.  I worried about how my food in the fridges and freezers were going to fare.  Even though I wasn't there it made us think a lot more about power outage preparedness, especially in cold weather.
Tom took the following five photos.

 Our two horses out in the field.

My flowering cherry blossom tree had just started blossoming before I left.  When I saw it I said "Oh no!" because we'd had a couple weeks of really nice weather and I knew winter wasn't over yet.  It's pretty hard on the plants to go back and forth between extremes like this.  This snow storm broke 3 major branches in the tree!  Sad!  You can see the pink blossoms through the snow. 

Elivia gets kind of excited over the snow, but she really doesn't like it yet.  I think her Dad had fun pulling her and baby sister around in it.  These are Traci's pictures.

 Are we having fun yet??  Emma looks like she's sleeping.