Right Out of National Lampoons Christmas Vacation

We decided to take care of haircuts for Jake and James, errands, and some Christmas shopping today. We left the house at 11am, hit Great Clips, Target, ToysRUs, Home Depot, Sears, McDonalds, BJs, PetSmart, and Premier Liquor. We got home around 5 and Jake decided he wanted to string up the Christmas lights on the top story of our house because they are calling for snow at the end of the week.

So Jake is outside on the porch roof in the dark while I'm at our bedroom window feeding the lights out to him and the kids are playing in Jamie's room. Stringing up lights in the dark seems to be an annual tradition of ours. I think our neighbors would think we were nuts if we did it during the day time. This year we also replaced our icicle lights with LED because we've had problems the past two years with our old ones and lights going out.

As Jake is hanging onto the edge of the house, hooking the strand up to those little plastic clips, the lights inside the house flicker and go out. Whaaaat? I think, how could these LED lights knock out the power to our entire house? Then I look across the street and see the lights at all our neighbors houses are out too. We took out the neighborhood too? ha ha ha Jake is standing frozen on the roof while the kids are in the other room screaming as if they are being murdered. There is no gate at the top of the stairs anymore so I go running before one or both of them tumble down. James bursts into our room and I get out to the hallway and grab Olivia. The lights come back on but the kids continue to scream. I see a red ring around Olivia's mouth, she is bleeding. Upon inspection, it seems she split her top lip somehow.

The kids finally calmed down and hung out in our room reading books while Jake continued with the lights. Just when he was almost done, the power goes out again. It's about 6:30 and long story short, the power did not come back on until 9pm! Thank goodness for our generator. Jake fired it up at 7:30, while we played board games with the kids, we baked frozen pizza for dinner and just as we were about to put the kids to bed, it came back on. What a long day! I still have no idea why the power went out in the first place.