What time is it, Mr. Fox?

So we use to play this game when I worked in a daycare back in high school with the afore mentioned name, a kind of red light green light but a heckuva lot more fun. One person was the "fox" and the others all lined up down field. They group would ask, "what time is it Mr. Fox?" and the fox would answer "three o'clock, or 7 o'clock, or whatever o'clock"... and then everyone would take that many steps towards the Fox. The goal of the Fox was to get everyone close enough to grab them and the group could control how big or little their steps were depending on how scared of the fox they were. Finally they would ask, "what time is it, Mr. Fox?" and the Fox would scream "MIDNIGHT" and then all the kids would shriek and run back to the starting line. The fox would chase and try to catch someone to be the next fox.

So yesterday was a weird day. Easter had passed, spring had sprung, flowers were blooming, then, snow started falling. Later that evening, we lost power. Now we don't live where it snows buckets and you lose power. Our snow is light, minimal, pretty much uneventful. I'm not even sure the power outage was related to the snow. It was about 9pm and we were sitting in the family room with the three girls when the whole place went pitch black. The 3-year-old froze in her tracks, the almost 2 year old grabbed onto my leg, and the 3 month old in my arms had eyes a big as saucers when hubby lit a candle to shed some light into the room. We lit some more candles and soon it was dim enough to make out other objects and people in the room. It's pretty hard to explain to the little ones what just happened. The almost 2-year-old kept saying "TV broken" and pointed the hapless remote at it repeatedly. We turned on the gas fireplace and read bedtime stories at the table by candlelight. It was quite fun actually. Everyone went to bed early since it was so dark.

Everyone had been sleeping a while when the power eventually came back on. I'm a light sleeper and woke up with a start to the sound of David Letterman's voice coming up loudly from down stairs and the lights in the hall on. I went downstairs to turn everything off and I happened to look at the only battery operated clock and noticed the hands were directly on 12:00am. The funny thing was, when you lose power, the clocks always come back on and blink at 12:00 and count up from there, so usually you can tell how long the power had been out. But since the power came ON exactly at 12:00am, the clocks all were blinking 12:00am and continued to tell the right time. When one of the girls woke us up a few hours later hubby noticed his cell said 2:44 and the blinking clock said 2:44 too. I explained the power went back on precisely at 12:00am. He thought that was pretty cool. Now what are the odds of that??!! I felt like saying, What time is it, Mr. Fox?" Then saying "MIDNIGHT", then screaming aahrrhhrhhhh!!!! It's like one minute off either way and it wouldn't of worked. I just thought it was pretty cool to be so exact like that. Plus all those technologically impared people that have trouble setting their digital clocks would for once be perplexed, confused, and relieved all at the same time.