I got home last night from a great weekend in DC for my best friend’s baby shower. Tonight, I had big plans of doing a full blog post about the cuteness overload of the shower I planned, but just as we were about to sit down to dinner, our doorbell rang.

OK, he wasn’t that cute, but there is something about a guy in a hard hat, isn’t there?

Our friendly power worker informed us that our neighbor two doors over was in the midst of a crisis. A tree fell on her house today and brought all the power lines down, ripping them out of her house. He said everything was fried and he had to cut the power, which all flows from the pole in our backyard.

Thankfully I’d just finished cooking dinner, so we were optimistic that maybe it wouldn’t take too long. But in 93-degree heat (at 7 p.m. still!), it got hot really quick in our house.

So we headed outside to play soccer, play in the yard and pretend that sticks were umbrellas:

But the longer we stayed outside, the more trucks that showed up.

It was getting dark. I was getting eaten alive by some killer mosquitoes. E. was getting tired. And DadJovi was beyond restless. So we loaded up into the car to go for a drive. E could not wrap her head around this concept.

“But where are we going, Mommy?” she kept asking. “To the park?

“No.”

“To school?”

“No.”

“Then where, Mommy, where??”

Finally even she grew tired of her questions and she conked out in the backseat. The good news is that it eliminated the normal bedtime battles — way-too-long baths, running from me when I tell her to brush her teeth, taking an hour to pick out books, picking out 12 books, 3 trips to the potty, asking for more water, etc. You get the drill.

Instead, I put a filthy child who played all day at school and then all night outside into her clean bed — dirty clothes on and all. June Cleaver I’m not, today, but I’m just so happy to have the lights back on!

And that shower recap will just have to wait one more day … or two.

What do you do when the lights go out? What are your survival secrets?