My Son Gabe's Second Birthday Party

As my sons birthday is approaching me this week, January 28th to be exact, I am in the sweet memory mode of recalling his past birthday parties and the most special one to date was the year Georgia experienced an ice storm. Back in 2005 a few days before my sons actual birthday we planned for months prior to have him a big family birthday party. Two months prior to my son's birthday we lost my brother in a tragic experience and I just wanted as many family members around as possible for my son's party because we were still hurting deeply inside. Three weeks prior to the actual party I went down to the store and stocked up on party supplies in my sons favorite theme, The Wiggles. Placed the order for The Wiggles cake that was a big part of the party because Gabe (my son) had been saying he wanted a Wiggles cake super, super bad and the invites were sent out. I was pretty much set and ready to go!

The night before the party the temperatures in Georgia fell pretty low and they said rain could possibly start to set in which may ice the roads and cause travel delays. I never thought for the life of me that it would be a major problem because we live past Atlanta further south and we hardly get bad weather in our town so I keep to the original plans and started to prepare some of the food for the next day. My husband took my son over to my parents house the night before to spend the night so he wouldn't be in the way of spoiling his Wiggles theme party and allow us to decorate and get everything ready for the next days set up. My husband and I watched the news and headed to bed around 11 pm with no rain yet moving in. At this point I thought "OK, we are just fine and it's going to stay North of us" but to my surprise that night started a different party that I had planned out to do.

About two to three in the morning I awoke to gunshot sounds. I looked around and realized the power went out and had been out for at least an hour by then. The ice had already started to form on the pine trees around our house and as they snapped and fell over from the ice that is when it sounded like gunshots. I went outside to see that the rain was coming down pretty hard and you could already tell ice was forming all over the roads. Now as a mom you can imagine my heart began to sink because I am now worried about the food I prepared earlier that night was going to get ruined without the refrigerator having any power. I eventually fell back to sleep around five in the morning and awoke again at seven with still no power.

We started to panic because the balloons hadn't been blown up and we had to get that done at Walmart and also still pick up the cake. Our Walmart isn't close, about a 20 minute drive away so we knew we better head out in case the roads were really bad. It took us about 40 minutes to arrive at Walmart and see that the store was closed down due to no power. This is where my Wiggles cake was at on order and they weren't even opened. Now I am not even going to have a cake for my son's birthday! What was I going to do?

Thankfully I finally came upon Kroger grocery store that was amazingly opened and went inside to see if they had a cake suitable for my son's party. Of course it wasn't a Wiggles cake but at least I was able to get a cake. At the same time we were able to get the balloons blown up there as well. Score, we knocked out two birds with one stone! Still the rest of the day was pretty much shot.

On the way home from the only store opened in my town I started to receive phone calls from people that were invited to the party. I wasn't surprised to hear they couldn't make it but was now worried that my own son wasn't going to be able to get back to his house for his own party.

When we got home the power was still off and thankfully the food in the refrigerator was still cold. I called my mom to make sure everything was OK at her house and asked if they could drive over to us. She said she would try and thankfully Gabe and my parents did show up.

Our power never came on that day, however we weren't going to let that stop us having a party. We had cake, cold cuts and such, and hey at least we didn't have to cut off the lights when we lite the candles for the cake! We had a great time even though no one showed up other then myself, my husband, my parents and of course the birthday boy himself. Guests or no guests it was a birthday that will always be remembered as the ice storm!