Our Sandy Experience

Our sandy experience turned out to be pretty mild.  Surprisingly we never lost power.  We never needed our bathtub full of extra water.  We never even needed our flashlights, lighter, and tons of spare batteries we rushed out to buy.  Sandy for us was a day and a half in doors looking out the window not seeing much action or reason for concern.

In fact Tuesday morning I was a little disappointed we didn't have a war story from this "huge" hurricane.  I decided we were going to walk around our area and see if anything had been damaged.  To my surprise only a block away you could see significant damage.  There were a lot of trees that had been ripped apart.  Three to four blocks East of us, closer toward the river, there were apartment buildings being pumped, and debris all over the sidewalks.  I felt a little bad I'd doubted Sandy.

Despite some minor damage to the area, things here are getting back to normal.  Restaurants have re-opened.  Grocery stores and other businesses are open again, and it feels pretty normal.  The one big thing though is that the subway is not running.  Other than that things feel almost normal where we are.  I guess that isn't the case everywhere though.  Last night on the news they were saying it was "The Tale of Two Manhattans".  The Manhattan above 35th street and the Manhattan below.  Apparently from 35th street down they are still with out power.  They say it could still be several days before it's back up and running again.  I feel really lucky we made it through with no serious side effects of the storm.

Here are some pictures of the damage around our area:

 Just a block from us outside the subway entrance on 96th street this tree had completely snapped.

 Closer to the river there were a lot of trees down.  This isn't the best picture, but this street was completely blocked off by debris.

 There is an Islamic Center a block away from us and the trees outside it got hammered.  They were all split all over the sidewalk.

 Closer to the river there was some flooding.

 Another shot of the tree's that got massacred.

 This was 3 blocks east of us.  Lots of sidewalks were not stroller friendly!

Our Sandy went a little more like this:

Once we realized we weren't likely to need our flashlights we decided to let the girls get some play time out of them.

My girls were so bored.  Hailey kept getting upset when she'd see people walking around outside.  She'd see people and she'd say, "Mom that person's outside!!  Why can't we go outside!"  She didn't believe me that the parks were closed.  

I love this picture.  This is how Sandy went for Marc and I...we ate a lot of candy, and watched a lot of T.V. and didn't do a lot else!

It has been nice for us to have Marc around.  The past three days he's just worked a little from home, but mostly spent time with us, so that's been great!  School is closed again today, and our principal sent out an email last night saying it would likely be closed through the week.  We'll see how long it takes for things to get back to normal here.  For now we are looking forward to a night of trick-or-treating!