I know Valentine's Day was over a month ago, but I have lots of pictures and stories from the month of February that I want to share. I'm recording my personal history, right?
So the afternoon before Valentine's Day right before the kids got out of school, seemingly out of nowhere, it started snowing really hard. I decided to go pick them up instead of making them walk. It was a good thing because within minutes the snow was blowing sideways and you couldn't see a few feet in front of you. About 30 minutes after we got home the power went out. Ricky decided to come home from work early, but it took him an hour and a half to drive what usually takes him 10 minutes. That was partly because he stopped a couple of times to pull people out of the ditch with his Jeep. But the real reason was that the blizzard was so bad that snow had blown across the road that goes to Eagle Mountain and they had closed the road. So traffic was deadlocked at the four corners in Saratoga Springs. (We actually didn't know this at the time.) So Ricky gets home and suggests that since the power was out and the kids wanted to make their Valentines, we should hop in the car and go back up to his work. We decided to eat dinner at Thanksgiving Point and spend the evening at the Dinosaur Museum. So, we turn out of the neighborhood and head north on Redwood Road hoping to turn right on the little back road that takes us to Thanksgiving Point. Well, that road was blocked by several police cars so we had no choice but to continue north into Bluffdale. We still thought, "no problem" we'll just get on the I-15 service road and cruise straight back into Lehi. Boy were we wrong. We sat on the service road for nearly 2 hours before we decided to just turn around and drive up to Draper to get something for our hungry children to eat. We stopped at Artic Circle and let the kids play until 9:30 when we thought that surely the traffic was cleared and we could easily get home. Wrong Again! We got about four miles from the turn into our neighborhood on Redwood Road and traffic came to a stop. We slowly made our way home, which took us another hour and a half. While we waited we found out from Mimi and Opa, who incidentally were enjoying a nice stay in a cabin in Midway, UT, that the News was covering the blizzard. They told us that pretty much all of the major roads in northern Utah county were deadlocked. School busses were trapped, some of them forced to bring the children back to school where many of them had to stay the night. The problem was that many parents were stuck in that insane traffic and unable to get to the school to pick up their kids. The newscasters were calling it an "apocalyptic blizzard." When we got home, the power was still out and the house was freezing, but we gathered all the blankets in the house, made sure the kids were warm and went to bed. The power came back on sometime after midnight and the next day was much better.
Here are some pictures that Ricky took the next morning when he went to take the garbage can to the curb.
The start of school was delayed until 11:00 so we got to have a nice Valentine's Day breakfast.
All 3 of the class Valentine's Day Parties that I was helping with went off without a hitch and Ricky and I even got to go out on a date! Mimi and Opa babysat and we enjoyed a romantic dinner at P.F. Changs in Orem. Love it!
And last but not least, here are the cards made for and sent to us by the Emmertsons. A month later, they are still on our mantle. We LOVE them!
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