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Therapy and sanity for ordinary parents of special kids.

Hurricane Irene: A Test of Parental Survival

Start the presses! We’ve got a new bumper sticker idea — I May Have Survived Hurricane Irene. It wasn’t the high winds, torrential downpours, or menacing sky that made the task so challenging. It was actually the loss of power, or more specifically, our children dealing with the loss of power.

“Oh My God Mom!” I can’t take it!” shouted my sixteen year old, Katie, on the verge of a full blown panic attack.

“I know, Honey, the wind is pretty scary, isn’t it?”

“It’s not the wind. It’s my laptop. There’s no Internet access!”

“Yeah Mom, and I can’t AIM or text. I won’t have any friends left. I’m doomed,” said my youngest.

“What do we do?” they asked, panicked.

“Well, we can play games or better yet, we can talk.”

“Talk! How can we talk? We have no Internet!”

“Ah, girls, I meant to your father and me”

“Oh God!” sobbed Katie.

“Girls, I’m sure it’s just temporary,” I said, reassuring them the best I could. “We’ll probably have our power back in a few hours.”

“A few hours? I can’t wait that long! We may as well just move because I won’t have any friends left.”

I don’t know what they were thinking. It certainly wasn’t easy on me, either. I’m as connected as the next dysfunctional, Facebook addicted person. Though, fortunately I had another way to stay occupied — a method that was quite foreign to them.

“Reading Mom, really? I hope you don’t expect us to do that.”

It seemed like a good plan, until their constant interruptions made concentrating impossiblet. “Mom, is the power back yet? Isn’t it, huh?”

“Why don’t you girls go upstairs and visit your father?” I asked.

“We can’t. He’s sound asleep.”

After his fitful sleep (about 8 hours), my husband came downstairs all nice and apologetic.

“Thanks for letting me sleep, Gene. By the way, you look really pretty.”

“Mike just so you know, you may want to tell me that when the house is not in a blackout.”

Fortunately, we managed to get the kids to sleep with the promise of a new, power-full day on a Monday. That is until 7:30 a.m. this morning when I was awakened by that painful shriek from Katie upon realizing that things had not changed.

“Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?”

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One Response to Hurricane Irene: A Test of Parental Survival

  1. Mary-Ann Hussey August 29, 2011 at 6:49 pm #

    you’re not the only one LOL we went to Panera Last night the place was filled with laptops we saw one family, mom, dad and three kids all of them had laptops I think it’s genius to offer free wifi at your restaurant LOL we didn’t have laptops with us, but only because we didn’t think of that, we were just searching out food 🙂

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