Rachel's First Power Outage & Fire Alarm

Thursday night was quite an adventure. I love monsoon season down in Arizona. Once or twice a week, there is a huge rainstorm and it just pours! On Thursday night, the monsoon hit our neighborhood very hard and all sorts of things were flying against our windows and we thought that they would come crashing in (we later read in the newspaper that winds got up to 100 mph). Then the power went out around 10pm. The rain/wind finally calmed down and we went to bed. At 2:00am (power still out), the fire alarm started going off in the whole building. There were ear piercing alarms in our apartment and all down the hallway. I checked the hallway and none of our neighbors were leaving, so we went out to our patio. All of our neighbors were on their patios too and they assured us there was no fire. I guess this used to happen a few years ago when the condos were new. Anyway, the ear piercing alarm was somewhat muffled on our patio, so we took a seat to wait for the fire department to come turn off the alarm. They arrived and couldn't turn it off for some reason - the building manager would need to come and turn them off. So we waited and waited and waited. I fed Rachel and she thought this was awesome since mom and dad were both up in the middle of the night and she got to be outside - so exciting. Then we waited and waited and waited. Around 4am, Brandon was getting real frustrated, so he decided to try to cover up the alarms in our apartment. His solution was to tape pillows over the alarms. I had to take a picture. Once we got the alarms covered and started putting cotton in our ears, they finally turned off at 4:15am! The adventures didn't end, since the power was still off. That meant NO A/C and it started to get real warm. The next morning, we were able to stay in the apartment until 11am, and then we had to get out. Rachel and I went to Target and Costco and then spent the afternoon at Natalie's air conditioned apartment. The power finally came back on Friday afternoon.

p.s. We went to Cold Stone (yum!) the other night and Brandon totally choked and got Blueberry Muffin Batter Ice Cream with rainbow sprinkles. I've gotta give Cold Stone props for making it taste exactly like blueberry muffin batter, but that is just gross. And sprinkles! I think sprinkles in ice cream should be outlawed. Brandon ended up throwing away half of it.