The Sweet Dreams Ritual

Most nights, when I tuck them into bed, I ask the girls to tell me some things for which they are grateful, in hopes that their thinking about good things immediately before bed will promote sweet dreams. Also because, it's a good idea to take pause on such matters. Here's a smattering of tonight's lists:

Sarah's:

My immune system, Emily (they've both named their immune systems. Kate's is Samantha)
Max, even though she just bit me
"Don't Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late"
Our house
The great, big sky and the moon that lives in it
All the green grass
Mommy, Daddy, Kate, Rex, Monkey and Lydia

Kate's:

All my books
You (me!)
My pink cowgirl boots
My lungs, because they help me breathe air
Air
Daddy
Birthday celebrations

Sometimes, I just have to get up and leave the room or I'd be there all night. This is one of those nights. I can still hear them both randomly listing things every now and then. I'm awfully grateful for them.

That's...Accuracy

Icing, Sweetness

This is our 5th snow (well, ice really) day in a row. When I saw, yesterday afternoon, that they'd already closed schools for today I begged Jeremiah to take the kids today. More to the point, I foisted them upon him and insinuated that if he didn't take them I was just going to leave them home alone while I ran (slid) screaming through the streets of Decatur.

So today he took the kids, their play tent, my iPad loaded with movies and various books to his office with him. I was elated to leave the house and go to my office. Cabin fever does strange things to a person. Nearly a week of trying to work at home with little kids running around squealing and often fighting resulted in some less than ideal mothering from me. Just when I was feeling relieved to have a kid-free day to get some work done, I received this scan from Jeremiah:

Now I miss my squealing, fighting children.

The Storm

We knew this storm was coming for a couple days. Weather.com showed a 100% of precipitation on Sunday night, with actual accumulation of snow, turning into sleet and freezing rain (I still cannot explain the difference between those two things). It showed up on schedule an dumped a lot of snow on us and, as promised, a lot of ice. At first it was beautiful, but now we're 2 days into it, the temperature won't get above freezing, and there's no sand, salt or plows. Our roads are sheets of ice and after 2 days of trying to work with everyone home and everyone a little twitchy and stir-crazy, I'm ready to go back to my office. I miss my office.

Still, we did take a lunch break today and slide our way over to the park for some sledding, which we did on an inflatable pool chair that happened to be in the park. Happily, we ran into our next door neighbors, Charlie, Allison and Aiden, who'd come with their snow board. We sat on it and whipped down the tiny hill available to us there, and it was fun. Then we headed over to the coffee shop, making a stop along the way to bring Rusty and Jennifer out of their house, for hot cocoa. The entire neighborhood was there. The streets were teeming with people out walking, often dragging children along in makeshift sleds (garbage can tops, other large hunks of plastic they found lying around), because no one here actually owns a sled. Except that one family. We all paused and watched in awe as they sledded by us in style. It was fun, but now I'm ready for this stuff to melt. It's not going to, though. Not until Friday. I hope it doesn't get all The Shining up in here.

A Bunch of Photos

I know it's been awhile, but after the high excitement of puppy adoption, December devolved into a series of illnesses and holidays. Those are two things you just don't want together. We would've given the sickness a miss entirely, but it wasn't up to us, turns out. We managed to have a nice time, including fun visits with family, but there wasn't a whole lot of photo-taking happening. Here's a bunch of random shots to sort of catch you up. I'll try to be better about this, but today I don't have a lot of time because there is a winter storm of epic proportions careening into town. It will probably be our End. The weather report shows a red "!" next to "severe" and a 100% chance of precipitation beginning tonight and promising to ruin any plans of productivity we have had for Monday, so we'll need to go fight our neighbors for the last of the bread and milk in town.

We saw REAL mermaids at the aquarium! They were just swimming around in there with all the other fish and some SCUBA divers.


While I took the girls to do that with some friends of ours, Jeremiah took the pets to the vet. Apparently that wore them all out.



Santa Claus sent video messages to both Kate and Sarah. He showed them each around different parts of his campus and talked directly to them about their behavior and what the elves might be working on for them. Here's Sarah watching hers for the 6th time:



Then, of course, Santa did come. And he ate all the cookies! The shot of the girls on the couch in the TV room is for their Aunt Jude. They are playing with their new fairy dolls and watching their new fairy movie. In fact, they were so into that gift from Oregon, they couldn't take a moment to actually talk on the phone with Aunt Jude or Uncle Kevin. "Can't talk. TV."