Can We Please Turn Off The Lights?

The remnants of Hurricane Patricia passed over our house last week. We got almost six inches of rain in a 48 hour period, knocking out the power to our neighborhood for a couple of hours. It was awfully dark for 2 o’clock in the afternoon, so we lit candles and dragged out board games and puzzles. The little boys chased each other around the house, up and down the stairs, and tried to scare each other by popping around the corners, and their three-year-old sister ran shrieking in their wake.

After an hour or so, they were bored with playing chase and not interested in playing Monopoly with the older kids. That was when I took the first Harry Potter book off of the shelf and began to read it to them. (They’ve seen the movie, but Rowling’s written works are so much better than anything on the screen.) The boys curled up next to be on our big red couch, as I started to read.

“Chapter One. The Boy Who Lived…..”

They were enchanted from the very beginning, and were sniggling with laughter at the funny parts, and sighing with sympathy in the sad.

By the time we got to Chapter Two, I looked up from the page to see that all of my children had joined us in the living room. The three-year-old was seated very close to my feet, and the older kids were draped across the big brown chair and its ottoman. They had read this book themselves many times, (we are on our third copy as they’ve literally read the covers off of the first two) but there’s something magical about hearing it read aloud.

Halfway through Chapter Three, the lights came back on and my children whined a sigh of regret.

“Can we please turn off the lights, Mom? Can we play ‘Power’s Out’ just a little bit longer?”

And so we did until the end of Chapter Four when it was time for me to make dinner.

Photo credit By Sander van der Wel from Netherlands ([350/365] Candlelight) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons