All thanks for the feedback and encouragement.
We are very thankful we were fortunate and suffered no harm, unlike some others on the East Coast.

Here's summary of return.
Sunday, we dropped the kids off at my mother in-laws for a previously planned 4 day stay. There were no damages/floods in her town.
Based on isolated flooding in our hometown we decided to delay our return until Monday, especially as we already paid up for Sunday night stay. My work notified that our corporate offices were closed so no rush to be physically in office on monday.

Monday 9 AM we pack up with the dog and head out on Route 80. Heavy traffic due to closures on Rt 46 & 3. We monitor AM traffic radio and maneuver accordingly, get on NJ Turnpike and make our home town. Trip that normally take 45 minute took 2 1/4 hours..not too bad considering the amount of flooding in the counties we went by. Several smaller rivers we passed over/by were brown and swollen..
Wife takes Path subway to work , I set off for home to unpack and start-up house. There were several streets closed/flooded out but I finally made our cobblestone street OK. No flooding on our street. I am surprised as we are one of the lowest points in town. Guess the early 1900's builders of the brick house community knew what they were doing and picked good drainage ground? (our neighborhood houses were the towns original ship builders quarters) Gonna check with our civil engineering friend who's professor at local college to get her input.

Exterior survey from sidewalk showed no damage. I perform an interior house walk-thru with Nebo 200 lumen flashlight (nicely made, reasonably price Fenix alternative), absolutely no damage to windows, floors or roofs. Confirm there are no gas leaks via smell. (Online reports mentioned several homes in our towns had natural gas leaks, mostly from gas hot water heaters and heating boilers in basements)
I reset the main electric breaker and again walk-thru, all power is good.
Our electric /gas utility company had techs checking homes and one visited mine shortly after my return.

As I'm unloading the 2 weeks of food, water and baggage from the CRV I get mildly heckled as an 'alarmist' by one passer-by, I shrug it off. There will ALWAYS be trolls...

Several close neighbors report some flooding in their semi-finished basements. As we only have cinder filled crawl space it's a non issue for me.
I had brought all our potted plants in from the two decks and front sidewalk, the potted dwarf plum and dwarf apple trees I left out. They fared well with no damage and actually appeared invigorated by the storm/wind.
I am glad I put plastic sheeting down before I brought plants in. I watered them a bit before we left and some drained onto the sheeting.

I had emptied our fridge before we left--I hate dealing with chemistry experiments due to power outage. I take the empty warm fridge as an opportunity to do a thorough and clean down and disinfect it.

When I had put the plywood up behind the ground floor picture window I had used a combination of screws and 10d nails. The screws zip out great with my cordless drill. I could not find my cat's paw to get the nails out. the local hardware was out of them so decided to get the Stanley wonderbar. The Stanley turns out full of fail for pulling nails-I find out after 30 minutes of screwing around with it. I resort to my hammer and BFS (Big fricken screwdriver),15 year old klein BEEFY flat tip 20 inch long with 5/8" square shank . Thing is my go-to tool when all else fails.

Methodically I get the critical stuff from the second floor back down to first. Third floor I repair and re-install the AC. Over next several days I move the rest of the stuff and clean up.

In our absense, some mice made their presence known by crapping all over the kitchen countertop, even though we left no food out. I've confirm their route is through the stove and onto the countertop. I've bagged two so far with old school Victor mice snap traps baited with a bit of tasty hot dog.

I inventory what I bought in prep for storm, as I spent a considerable amount tweaking our go bags. Recent purchases like the Jetboil zip (mega win), Sea/summit dry bags and other assorted items I keep as I used and like em. I dont need the extra MSR dragonfly camp stove, black diamond lanterns, and several other impulse buys are going back to the local EMS store for refund.

Things we did right.
We expected the worse and hoped for the best
Confirmed flood and home insurance contacts and policy before hand. Made a 'practice and training' call to claims.
We got all our ducks in a row and did not panic.
We had sufficient preps.
We shut down and started the house correctly.
We evacuated based on our research and evalaution and as recommended by local authorities.
We picked proper location to bug out to rather than a state/local evac shelter.

Things we learned coulda done better:
I worked about 2 AM into Saturday morning finalizing house prep and our tweaking our stuff. With early warning of storm some things could have been done sooner, even though our final decision to leave was not made till Friday.
I threw approx $120 of food out, slightly larger cooler would have minimized the loss.
A mental thing, and probably every new gun owners worry. I was concerned traveling
with a weapon with my family, even though I did everything legal.Mostly afraid of leaving it behind somewhere or losing it.


Things I want to add shortly for our storm and general preps:
Lockable, secure storm shutters for ground floor windows on sidewalk side.
Inflatable Sevylor (had one as a teenager) or similar boat to fit family in worse case scenario.
Rooftop box for CRV. Anything that didn't get into cargo space got scrunched everything in with kids in back seat