When candlelight is no longer romantic

Living in a developing country comes with many unexpected blessings: more time together as a family, fewer media/digital distractions and temptations, lots of natural food (seriously - I get milk from a neighbor who brings it fresh from the cow in the mornings and I flash-pasteurize it. Those same cows walk by my house and have even grazed in my yard) and plenty of reminders of how fortunate we are in the developed world to have seemingly unlimited access to water and electricity and things like that. It's winter now, so we get LOTS of reminders of what a blessing it is to have these basic things - if you know what I mean. :)
Take today - electricity went out at 9am (which is admittedly better than it was in November). It came back at 1pm for 15 minutes and then went out again. Then it came back again at 4pm and went out again 10 minutes later. It came back again at 5:20pm and we got it for an hour, then it went out again. It came back for 5 minutes at about 6:30 and now, at 7:30pm, it's still out. This is one reason why we'll stick with the Macbook while we live here - you can't beat the battery-life of a Mac! The kids are watching Shawn the Sheep (in German) on one computer and I'm writing this on the other.
There's a certain amount of "taking-it-in-stride" that you develop while living like this but some days it gets to the point where it feels like a joke. As if there is a small child turning the electricity off and on like a kid pressing all the buttons on an elevator (ie: "hmmmm, what happens when I press that one?"). There are funny moments surrounding the giving and taking of electricity. Today, while it was off, Annabel was looking at the Christmas tree remarking, "Balls! Balls!" and "Lights! Lights!" and right when she said, "Lights!" the lights came back on. The look on her face was priceless, like she suddenly realized she had some special power. Of course, the lights went right back off 10 minutes later, but that didn't seem to bother her. A bit later, after we'd eaten dinner, Annabel ran into the kids' room and Hannah and Emmett and I were still in the kitchen. The power went off (and it was pitch-black in our house) and we all rushed off to find Annabel, calling, "We're coming Annabel!" Hannah and I were feeling around in the kids' room when we heard Emmett in the living room call out, "I found a Babben!" (which is what the kids call her - Babben) like he won a game. Sometimes the kids put bits of bread on a fork and hold it over the flame of a candle, "roasting bread" and, of course, you can't forget about molding the melted wax into little balls. All those semi-cute and funny things are lovely and welcome but I was beginning to have a bad attitude about it all. Our house is COLD without electricity. We light a gas heater in our main living room area to take the edge off but it gets really old going around lighting everything that needs to be lit, having the electricity come back, blowing everything out and turning on things that we needed electricity for (the clothes washing machine particularly), just to re-light everything 15 minutes later when it gets cut again. Try changing a squirmy toddler's dirty diaper in the dark - yikes! And then there's trying to remember which lights were off and which were on when the electricity went out. It's really confusing when you suddenly wake up in the middle of the night with all the lights on. It's even worse if you're so tired you don't wake up but your kids wake up, thinking it must be morning - ugh. We try to write on most light-switches which direction is off and on but that wears off faster than you'd think. What's really remarkable is that with the exception of walking into a few open doors, the kids seem to have fewer bonks when it's dark. They aren't running around less either. Maybe they have night-vision that I don't know about?
After I got Annabel's dirty diaper changed, got her in three layers of jammies and started doing the night-night routine, I got convicted of my bad attitude. The kids weren't complaining (though they really appreciate that "in America there's always electricity!") but I was getting huffy and impatient with the on-again-off-again trick. I remembered how last night electricity came back and stayed on while we had a really nice ladies' meeting at our house - not cutting out once the whole evening. I thought about the first week of December, when we had a whole week of really good electricity. I'm thinking now of the almost 1 million people who were displaced in the Philippines recently  during the typhoon - who may not even have a home to return to, let alone electricity. I decided that it was one of those moments that I needed to act more like my kids and be thankful they weren't acting more like me! Candlelight isn't as novel as it once was (at least to me) but I can let it remind me to be thankful and if nothing else, roast some bread or make wax balls from the candles. :)