moments from the year
mountaineers
Here are some of the our top moments and images from the past year of 2021. I limited myself to three photos for each month, which was really hard, because there were so many good moments... but for the rest you can just look through the archives. Here's to lots more wonderful moments in 2022!
January
perfect beach weather
back to school, with dessert
another day, another ice adventure
February
the sledding horizon
ready for some hot chocolate
at the top of the hill
March
proper attire for spring walks
accomplished adventurers
private time at school
April
it's above freezing!
sunrise ride
a windy day at the river
May
pausing on a hike with friends
our pond!
these boys don't mind the rain
June
we haven't done this in a while!
he needs independence too
feeling no heat
July
action!
advertureland
we went to the beach
August
you have to, on vacation!
cool and comfortable at the beach
water park
September
beach vacation
back to school
pondside park day fun
October
dock transforms to boat
early fall trails
bundled up for the water
November
they don't need that bridge
yay ocean!
the annual project
December
he'll never fall
getting ready
bye sun, see you in a while
moments from the week
post-Christmas outside time
Moments from the past week.
riverbank home
the Park Day ice is almost ready
school group party
New Years Eve excitement!
what did we do with the old one?
When the younger two boys got vaccinated the thing they were most looking forward to was the annual New Years Eve party at our friends' house. Which of course we missed last year. Then when the omicron surge got going and there was a chance it might not happen, they were prepared to be crushed. Happily, limiting the party to a core group of friends and having everyone take a rapid test beforehand meant that, never mind the pandemic, we were all able to celebrate the New Year the way it's meant to be celebrated!
Or the way some people mean it to be celebrated anyway... the boys were strongly in favor of staying up until midnight, which I didn't think sounded like a good idea at all. I felt sick and woozy just contemplating it! But with a party that got going at 6:00 I figured we'd have plenty of time for fun and then still get to bed at a reasonable hour. I guess I didn't anticipate how much fun it was going to be!
Fun and food. There were only three families there, including the hosts, but we all felt like creating a festive atmosphere required plenty of food and drink. I made coleslaw, rolls, and a pecan pie, and also brought crackers and dip. Then there was chili, cornbread, chips with a green enchilada dip, caramel popcorn, chocolate chip cookies, oreos, and candy. Oh, and a bowl of baby carrots. Luckily there was an appropriate amount of alchohol to counter some of the sugar flooding my blood and keep me from exploding; I'm not sure how the kids survived.
Actually, I'm not 100% sure how they spent most of the party. The hosts kept them off screens until 6:30, so they got to participate in a couple card games, but then they vanished into the other room to play on a couple Switches and watch some of the old Avatar show. There was also an air hockey table in there so I guess they had the option to move a little bit if they wanted. Me, I didn't move much unless it was too and from the buffet. I just sat at the table and played games: Pit, Dungeon Mayhem, Spit, Pokemon cards, Root, and Regicide. I lost most of them but that doesn't matter; I was still having a great time!
I knew it was getting late, but I was still surprised when I finally checked the time and saw it was just past 11. Awareness of the hour sent my body into shutdown mode, and I barely managed to collect the boys and say a polite goodbye before stumbling out the door. All three boys had been advocating that we stay up til midnight, so when we got home at 11:30 they felt that we were so close we might as well wait up that last half hour! Plus they wanted to hear stories. I knew, though, that if I didn't get myself into bed instantly I might die, so I declined. Of course, I told them they could stay up as long as they wanted! Tucked in their beds Harvey and Elijah fell instantly to sleep—as did I—but Zion, our king of willpower, held on til the bitter end. Though, as he reported in the morning, he was a little disappointed to miss the precise turning of the year: he looked at his watch at 11:57, then blinked and it was 12:03.
All that excitement was pretty hard on us! We took a walk in the afternoon on New Years Day and Elijah, who began it full of joy and energy, was in a grumpy sulk before we got back to the car. Back at home he unspeakingly ran himself a bath and soaked for a while, then came downstairs in his bathrobe and promptly fell asleep on the couch for two hours. Yes, it was hard work but worthy work: this New Year was properly celebrated.
five out of a thousand
great outdoors
The best kind of New Years Resolutions to make are ones for other people. This year I resolved that my children—and me too!—would spend 1,000 hours outside over the course of the year. At a minimum. 1,000 Hours Outside is a thing; ironically, I heard about it on Facebook (which I barely ever look at, honest!) but it seems like solid motivation to get out and moving. And sometimes it's fun to do things other people are doing too. Of course, there's an argument to be made that midwinter isn't the best time to kick off this sort of challenge—but on the other hand, now's the time when we need some pressure to keep us from settling into too cozy a hibernation!
We kicked off the hours with a whole-family walk at Fairhaven Bay on Saturday afternoon. It was gray, damp cool, and drizzly: just the weather to make you love being outside. There was some dissension in the ranks as to how far we should try to walk, but in the end the compromise of about an hour and a half out was about right. Elijah really wanted to go farther, though, so he was pretty grumpy after we turned back towards the car. He stayed grumpy all the way home then stomped upstairs without talking to anyone, ran himself a bath, then came downstairs in his bathrobe and fell asleep on the couch for two hours. After that he was the liveliest and cheeriest of all of us!
everybody was having fun, I promise
Yesterday we took a walk with friends up to the center of town, where we played on the playground and skate park. Some of us discovered that it's possible to slide down the halfpipe head first on your back! Thrilling. We also visited the library. Then today I tortuously manipulated our errand route to take us by Mount Misery in Lincoln, where Harvey, Elijah and I—Zion was home with a stomach ache—enjoyed walking up and down the hills, across logs over streams and ditches, and, tentatively, onto the brand-new ice. It's finally gotten cold! It's been a while since we walked at Mount Misery; in fact, we haven't since our first visit back in late summer of '20. It was so dry then that the streams were basically gone, but we saw the bridges and wished we could enjoy the water. We enjoyed it today!
but be careful not to experience it too directly
With four days down in the year we're at five hours outside. Well under the two and three-quarters a day needed to hit 1,000, but it's early days. Cold and wet days, too; things'll be different in the summer. And not only are we doing better than some other folks I know doing the challenge, we're having fun too!
concluding the season
We said farewell to Christmas this evening, helped along by a beautiful Godly Play at Home Epiphany story that Elijah got to participate in over Zoom. We took down the tree; it was just as quick putting away all the decorations as it was getting them up a month ago. We'll miss it tomorrow morning—those lights really are the best—but it's also nice to have our school room table back (putting up a tree in our little house requires some compromises with the furniture). Of course, since we don't do king cakes or anything like that the real end-of-Christmas excitement for the boys comes from the ritual dismemberment of the gingerbread houses!
get that roof off
Like with the tree it's a little sad to see them go—such lovely decorations, and mine was my best in years—but now we have some shelf space back. Plus people sitting in that spot are no longer tormented by the smell of delicious candy and gingerbread, which is fine. And now we get to enjoy it in a more direct fashion. Our dessert plans for the next week or so are set!
munch munch
the return
I was looking through old blog posts the other day trying to find out the last time we went to Mount Misery and I came across one from June of 2020 where I suggested the pandemic might be drawing to a close. Hah! In my defense, it's hard to remember those early days when we washed our hands—and changed our clothes!—whenever we came inside, when streets were empty, and when we tried to only go to the grocery store every two weeks. For sure, compared to that summer 2020 was a return to a semblance of normality—normality with masks—and even when cases were up again in the winter we had mechanisms in place to see other people and generally live our lives. And go to stores, because that's what we do in the USA. We didn't ever forget about Covid, really, but we weren't living in constant fear.
And now we kind of are, again! In the week between Christmas and New Year Bedford saw, I'm pretty sure, more than double the number of new cases than we had in any week previous. In-person Kids Church was cancelled last weekend, and now all of our services are going remote for the next two weeks (the "at least" doesn't need to be said out loud). And everybody knows someone who's gotten it. And yet, when I stopped by the grocery store this afternoon on my way home from a restorative bike ride, the place was packed. Shouldn't people be more afraid?! Or maybe they actually were, because I sure was and I still waited in line to get my giant box of spinach and my potatoes and my soyrizo. But we might not go again for a little while, and certainly not every day. It kind of feels like a real pandemic again! I wonder what will happen next?
snow day
Today we saw our first real snow of the winter. It started overnight and there was easily three inches on the ground by first light, but the boys didn't even realize it right away. We're so used to just getting a dusting at a time. At breakfast they noticed that it was piling up on the outside table—maybe four inches by then—and somebody said, "wait, it's really snowing!" Yes indeed. Leah, who had already been out with the dogs, could have told them that! We had a little work to do before they could go out and play in it but when a neighbor friend rang the bell at around 9, there was no holding them back. They spent the next three hours roaming the snowy streets, shoving snow in each others' faces (and each others' faces in the snow), and, in Elijah's case, working hard to make a snow fort.
snow is to dig
I made them a hot lunch in acknowledgement of all their hard playing, and then after lunch we spent some time in that other great snow-day occupation: board gaming. By the time we finished the game (Harvey won, as usual) the snow had stopped falling despite some people's gear being quite wet we pulled the sleds out from the basement, got dressed again, and headed out to go sledding. Despite the kind of late start and the distance we drove to be able to sled with friends on the slopes of the golf course conveniently located across the street from the their house, we made the most of the remains of the day and got a great many runs in before it was too dark to see where the bumps were. It feels like we've waited quite a while for a real snowy day, and when we got it we were ready to enjoy it to the fullest. Plus it gave us five more hours to add to our total!
snow day is done
moments from the week
sledding life
Moments from the past week.
I made a thing
above the ice
engineering play
a mistical moment
snow day chilling
time to play trains
dogs love snow
ending an outside day
board games new and old
We played a lot of board games this past weekend. Or a lot of hours of board games at least; many of those hours were occupied playing Root, which I gave Harvey for Christmas. I've heard it described as "Risk meets Redwall", which means that we get to play as cute forest creatures—cats and birds and bunnies—battling for control of the forest. The real draw of the game, though, is that each faction has different goals and even game mechanics, so when you learn to play one it's still like figuring out a whole new game to pick up another one. Lots of replay value there! And if we ever get bored of the base game, there are (of course) expansions to buy, that add yet more factions. We're sorely tempted already, but at the moment the budget does not allow.
Of course, with new games coming in our game shelf gets more and more crowded, and a few days ago I took some time to neaten it up a bit and pull out all the games I don't see anyone playing anytime soon. It was mostly the little kid games that didn't make the cut, and I was sad to see them go. How much fun we had playing Snail's Pace Race, and Pengoloo, and the Ravensberger 4 First Games! You can bet that I didn't get rid of them; they're safe down in the basement in case we ever want a little shot of nostalgia. Just like with the adventures, sometimes I miss those simpler days of hanging out with small people. Of course, if they were still small who would play Root with me?! These days are pretty good too. Especially since on Saturday, after ten or twelve games since Christmas, I finally won for the first time!
how are my children like the young Alexander Hamilton?
Yesterday morning Elijah asked me if we were having potatoes with breakfast. No, I told him. He asked what we were having and I said french toast. "What else?" he asked. When he heard it was just the french toast he wandered away looking disappointed. Standards are high around here! Despite the lack of potatoes yesterday it was kind of a busy baking day, actually; even if you don't count the french toast I made biscuits, wheat bread, sourdough bread, and brownies. And soup for supper. The biscuits also were not universally appreciated. During our school time with friends I said I was going to go make a snack and Harvey was excited for a second, then suspiciously inquired if it was going to be sourdough biscuits; clearly that's been our school snack too many times for his liking. Whether or not they were as exciting as everyone could want biscuits just out of the oven with butter and jam must have been fine, because five kids (six if you count the baby, who does actually eat now) finished them all in pretty short order. So I guess I'll just keep doing what I'm doing!
blogging is like a full-time job!
I'm trying to get all the pictures together for my annual photo recap post, but I keep running into the problem of all the times this year when I left gaps in the record. If I hadn't intended to ever fill those gaps, it wouldn't matter at all; sometimes the blog here just isn't a priority and that's ok. But in February 2021 and again in November I had many half-finished posts that I fully intended—still intend, sometimes!—to finish at some point, and some of them include photos. Plus there's the last day of camping I never wrote about (failing to finish the camping write-up is actually a disappointing theme in this blog, actually). I've been filling in November the last couple days, and it's a lot of work—I see why I didn't manage to do it when it actually was November! Oh well, I'm sure it'll all be worth it some day.
our ice expertise
We've had some icy adventures the last few days. Yesterday's park day saw its fair share of sledding, but the snow was really too thin for sustained fun so it was the ice that really held everyone's interest. It was a solid as you could wish for—well, as I could wish for, anyway. Plenty of other parents were a little nervous, so I did my best to reassure them. My line of reasoning was that once a big section of pond is frozen to any depth, to the point that it doesn't move or squish when you step on it, its failure mode becomes much less obvious. Nobody's going to "fall through" at that point, unless they find a weak spot, and I checked before the free-for-all began to make sure there weren't any near the beach. And we weren't totally reckless: I bet we could have ventured pretty far out, but to the disappointment of a couple kids we kept them within 20 yards of the shore. Where, I must say, there was still plenty of fun to be had.
new vistas of delight
So nobody got wet, like the last two weeks. But don't worry, we had our ice-tastrophe for the week a little earlier, on Tuesday, when on a walk at October Farm Riverfront in the beautiful 12° weather Zion stomped through the ice next to the river and got wet up to his knee. No real harm done, of course, except we had to cut our walk short, which made Elijah very grumpy. Even with the quick retreat to the car Zion's pant leg froze completely solid before we got the heater on it, which was pretty cool!
I think it was actually my stories of all the times that I and the children in my care did fall through the ice that convinced some of the other parents that the park day ice wasn't as dangerous as they thought. Clearly, we've had vast experience and must know what we're talking about! So eventually everyone let their kids venture out and they all slid around on feet, tummies, sleds, a snow skate, and in the case of one prepared family actual ice skates! It could only have been better if we'd had hot chocolate, and if there wasn't a thin layer of sticky snow on the part of the ice we allowed the kids to play on. We did manage to scrape some of it off, though a shovel would have made it easier; but in the absence of anything designed for the purpose the big kids were happy to use Elijah as a sweeping tool!
he's happy to do his part
We all hope it stays cold, and also snows, so we can play on the ice more next week and also sled down the hill behind the beach way out onto the ice. I'm checking the weather forecast a couple times a day now...
pandemic calcium
I've written before about strange shortages resulting from the pandemic, and now with the omicron we're into shortage time again. Or supply chain disruption, at least. Over the last week our family's been disrupted out of salad greens and pasta, but what's been the hardest to cope with—and lasted the longest—has been the lack of regular orange juice at Market Basket. We prefer the kind with pulp, and it's been completely absent for at least three weeks now. Initially we were able to sub in the regular pulp-free kind, but before long even that was gone and all that was left was pulp-free with added calcium. So that's what we've been drinking the last two weeks. (I guess the calcium from the orange juice can fill in for what we're missing in not having salad greens? There's certainly no shortage of milk in our house, ever.)
What I wonder most about the whole situation is, why is there so much calcium-added juice available? What strange twists of the supply chains allowed it to be supplied when other, more palatable orange juices couldn't be? Or is it that the people who like calcium in their juice are also the people who are afraid to shop during pandemic peaks, and other regular orange juice drinkers are pickier than we are about substitutions (or less desperate)? I have no idea. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
moments from the week
big ice, big sky
Moments from the past icy week.
mask project
the closest ice to our house
games when you need hours outside
coldest day ice
the library has all kinds of things to play with
it's harder than it looks!
ice the way it's meant to be experienced
I know I talked about our ice expertise the other day, but I should probably have noted that it was not complete, because the boys had never actually been ice skating. Well, almost never—there had been a few attempts, including one birthday party, when Harvey was seven or eight, but they were not successful. Skating wasn't at all Harvey's thing at the time, and his distress put Zion off the sport completely (Lijah was too young to even know what was going on). But yesterday afternoon we started to remedy that oversight.
look at them go!
Zion and Elijah have been asking about skating since last Wednesday, when Zion's best friend brought his skates and demonstrated some skill on the pond. On Saturday we spent a delightful (and extraordinarily cold) hour on the frozen Old Reservoir, and while sliding and biking (!) on the that ice was plenty of satisfying fun, they wondered still more about how much better it would be with metal blades on their feet. So yesterday after we spent the first 45 minutes of our budgeted outside time on some farm work—improvements to the chicken coop—I dug up the bag of skates to see what we could do.
Not too badly, as it turns out! The skates Harvey wore last time we tried this now fit Elijah, and Zion found that he was able to use Leah's. We have two pairs my size—which means Harvey's size too—so all of us boys would have been accommodated, but after reflection Harvey decided he'd rather take a walk with a friend. Also great! So the younger boys and I set off for Fawn Lake, which is maybe not as exciting and private as the Old Reservoir but a little more accessible by car, carrying skates.
Because energy and attitude is all, both boys did amazing on their first attempts. Different styles—Lijah threw himself into it and fell down oh so many times, while Zion was more cautious and mostly stayed upright—but both of them made great progress. After the initial learning steps we made it more than half way across the pond before they started to look tired and I told them, over protests, that we had to turn back.
Our feet and ankles hurt and Elijah's backside was pretty wet, but enthusiasm for future skating outings was high as we made our way back to the car. Going to bed last night Lijah asked if we were going skating again today; when I told him the weather didn't look the best he said that, in that case, we should have stayed longer our first time. I've promised them lots more chances... I just hope the ice holds out!
can you see them way off in the distance?
water everywhere
I had an unusually wet morning yesterday. There was the weather: wind-whipped wild rain going every which way, including into the cellar when a downspout fell off (and all over me when I went out to fix it). With the ground frozen our yard turned into a bit of a pond, but nobody went out to experience it because just opening the door got us pretty wet with the rain blowing in. Then there was the frozen spinach I was thawing on the counter overnight that leaked green water everywhere. But worst of all was when I reached for the clock in the morning and knocked over the glass of water Elijah had left on my bedside table when he came into the bed with us at 4:00, and spilled it all over my pillow and my clothes that I'd put at the head of the bed to be warm. My face too, but that dries easily. Then by mid-afternoon it was sunny and beautiful, so I don't mean to complain... it just all felt so thematic I thought it was worthy of comment!
more skating
As part of our bedtime routine I ask each of the boys what was their favorite thing about the day, and last night Zion said that his was skating. And, in fact, that it would be skating every time we were able to go. We went again yesterday, back to Fawn Lake, and with Harvey this time. On Sunday the pond was bumpy and busy with lots of other skaters; yesterday, after Monday morning's rain, it was empty, and smooth and mottled with frozen puddles that reflected the trees and sky like glass.
mirror ice
Or like water: we thought they were water when we arrived, and were worried about getting soaked when we inevitably fell. No, it was easily below freezing and that was all beautiful ice. The only water was at the edge of the pond, which made getting out on to the ice a little tricky, but once we were there it was smooth sailing. Zion and Elijah picked up right where they left off and made great progress (though Elijah didn't fall any less and Zion actually fell more—that's because were going much faster and trying harder things). Harvey tends to be cautious but he worked hard at getting moving and actually learned faster than his brothers had yesterday. Nobody was gliding smoothly around the pond—nobody but me, that is—but the younger boys were definitely able to get where they wanted to go and Harvey was moving forward with ever-increasing confidence. We all kept at it until we just about couldn't stand up on the skates any more, which is a sign of a good outing.
nothing but blue skies
Combined with our walk to the library in the morning the skating netted us three hours outside on the day, which isn't bad. If it's not going to snow, I'm sure glad we're skating to give us something else to do with the winter!
we love ice!
what about schooling?
It's not all skating and outdoor adventures over here. In fact, in January we've been refocusing on academic time—the ever swinging pendulum of my home education desires has moved away from unschooling towards a desire for some organization. And so far everyone is surviving! Surviving, and even some of the time enjoying themselves. Besides the regular things, the older two boys are working on learning all the states and capitals and are having a fine time looking them up in our giant atlas (it doesn't matter that it features the Soviet Union and two Germanies, though I guess we'll have to think about alternatives if we want to learn about current European geography...).
US borders haven't changed much since the 80s
We're also working on writing, which is probably the area where all three boys are the farthest off where the expectation would be if they were in school. Not that that's particularly concerning; they're all fine storytellers and they're all enthusiastic consumers of all kinds of different writing, so I have no doubt that when they find something they want to write about they'll do fine at it. Still, I do want to give them the opportunity to do that sooner rather than later if they want to, so we're doing some practicing. This being homeschooling, though, we do try and keep the writing time cozy!
Lijah works in his warm space
dogs are important to the writing process too
moments from the week
skate boys
Moments from the past week, just as icy as the last.
trying out the new roost we made
evening ice
Harvey skating too
park day ice party
strategic masterminds
what friends are for
the smoothest pond ice you'll ever see
life on ice
surprise exploration
This afternoon after our school friends left the boys and I headed out to walk the dogs. We weren't planning anything big—just a quick loop in the nearby woods and then back home to do all the home things we had to do. But at the furthest point in the loop Zion asked if we could check the ice on the swamp—the swamp that's so fun and so hard to explore most of the year, the ice of which has been stubbornly refusing to get really solid—so of course I said yes. To our great pleasure, the giant puddle on the path that's featured on so many of my pictures was frozen over, and so was all the flooded swamp right up to Hartwell Brook. Even more amazing, the brook itself was almost completely frozen over, and it was easy enough for us to use its course as a path heading upstream towards the cranberry bogs and the airport, over territory we'd never been able to really explore before. As new vistas opened up before us, my delight was tempered by only one thing: I didn't have a camera with me! Not even my phone.
So sad. And yet, it's really only sad for you, the reader, because we got to experience the horizon opening up as we left the tall grass, the frozen dams where we stepped up six inches to higher levels of brook, and the cranberry bogs themselves where we slid on the ice and wished, like another time long ago, that we had a shovel to scrape off the little bit of snow that fell last night. We also experienced being a little bit lost, and I had the joy—once we were off the actual ice surface and just crossing puddles in the woods—of breaking through and submerging one foot completely. Never mind; we weren't more than 15 minutes from home at that point and it was totally worth it anyway.
We're thinking about going back tomorrow to slide some more, or even try skating. The bogs are a much better surface than they have been for years; I guess that's what happens when it rains all fall and then freezes suddenly with very little snowfall. It's my theory that the high water is also responsible for the brook freezing: years ago we determined that it could be running even when everything else is completely solid, and that's been true every winter since then. But this year the water level was so high the brook didn't really exist—not that we ever could have determined that before the freeze! But now we see that the ice in the swamp extends straight and flat over the brook's course, which may have slowed its flow down enough to freeze over. The brook is certainly still running under the ice, and there were a few spots of open water we had to detour around (and lots of sticks and dead trees to maneuver past) but overall it was as good an exploration route as you ever could want.
Yes, the kids and I were excited, the dogs were thrilled at the extended outing, we added to our outdoor time... it would have been the perfect afternoon if only I had had my camera! Almost perfect will have to be good enough.
word play
I think it's important to note that I was playing Wordle before it was cool. Well, before it was all over the news and Facebook, anyways, by a week at least. It's right up my alley: a game that combines logic with knowledge of English vocab and orthography? Sign me up! That you can only play once a day is a nice benefit too, since a Wordle game each morning has helped wean me—mostly—off what was becoming a debilitating addiction to cardgames.io. But then it blew up, and everybody started playing it and talking about it all the time (I was talking about it too, but obviously that didn't bother me). The boys were wondering if I was upset that the game was cool now, but that wasn't the problem. Instead, the problem was everyone posting their daily score. See, I'm super competitive but really don't like competition; when I felt like Wordle was just a game I was playing against myself each morning it was low-stakes fun, but now I can't help shake the thought that all my facebook friends are working on the same word, and they might get it in fewer guesses than me!
Of course, that hasn't stopped me from playing. I just try not to think about it. And after all, I am pretty good at the game: I've only failed to get the word once in the month I've been playing. And what kind of a word is rebus anyway, I ask you?!
winter playground
We went back to the cranberry bogs yesterday, from the other direction. They're so easy to get to, going the direct route: just a couple minutes walk through the woods from the road. Then once we got out there we spent an hour or so just playing. We cleared a rink with the shovel we brought, slid, explored, and made snowmen—little snowmen, since there was maybe an inch of snow on the ice. It was so much fun, I couldn't imagine how the woods weren't crowded with everybody in the neighborhood and beyond... it was like the best playground ever!
he's little but plucky
Of course, that's not to say it was all fun and games. Elijah and Harvey had a disagreement about who was responsible for creating the first snowman's face, and Elijah got pretty upset and stomped off to make his own snowman. He was mad at me too, so when I told him to watch out for some thin ice he showed me what he thought of my advice by stomping on it until he broke through and found himself up to his knee in muddy water. That surely improved the situation!
he threw his wet boot so hard
Even with one boot off, though, he was determined to finish his work, so we didn't rush off. And despite that bit of grumpiness I think it's safe to say we were all glad for the trip. Hooray for winter wonderlands, right near home!
the fun you can have with a shovel, snow, and ice
winning life
The boys played The Game of Life today with their grandparents. At bedtime Harvey was telling me that he almost won... he was just $10,000 behind Zion.
"You win life by finishing with the most money?" I asked him, like the good hippy I am. "I think it's more like, you win if everyone who knows you loves you!"
That sounded good to him. "Then I already win!" he said. "I'm speedrunning life!"
But no: you need to have everyone love you at the end. That's harder, I think. But I agree, he's off to a great start!
skating joy and pain
Since we're doing this skating thing, we thought it would be worthwhile to maybe get our skates sharpened. Me and Harvey at least; the littler boys' are in fine shape, and I wouldn't want to mess with their technique in any case. There's a skate shop by Leah's chiropractor, so she brought them in yesterday afternoon before her appointment. Then with a free half hour or so before dinner I thought it would be a shame not to try them out on Fawn Lake—maybe the last chance I would have before the big snow! So I did. It was fun, and the sharpness helped a bit, but oh my goodness did my feet hurt. I'm a little out of skating shape; I guess taking 15 years off and then skating every other day for a week and half isn't really the way to do it! My hand-me-down skates from the 90s (80s?) don't really fit 100% either. Of course, being able to enjoy ice the way it's meant to be experienced it has been pure joy, but I'm also glad it's going to snow this weekend: my feet need a break!
don't they look sharp
moments from the week
the cheeriest snowman in the bogs
Moments from the past week.
our living room at nine AM
making his own one
sure, scooters can ride on walls
river walk
a little snow doesn't stop the skating
rink break
blizzard boy
blizzard
It snowed on Saturday. We were anticipating it: it was in the forecast since at least the beginning of the week, but the amount kept changing. Would it be seven inches? Or 19? In the end the forecasters decided to give us a blizzard warning and lots of news chatter about a potentially historic storm. Some of that chatter was probably because we haven't had a big storm yet this year, and the first one always gets the most press. But even so, it was certainly a real blizzard. We didn't get two feet of snow, but we got plenty.
Elijah demonstrates the depth
It was actually hard to tell how much, because the main feature of the storm was the wind. It was relentless all day, and it blew the snow clear off some areas while depositing it thickly other places. And it was the wind that kept the boys from spending more than an hour and a half playing outside, since it was kind of hard to open your eyes if you were facing anywhere between north and east. Their game of "push snow into your friends' faces" also maybe limited their ability to stay out, but not as much as you might expect. In that time Harvey's hair picked up a dramatic amount of snow—from the air and from his friends combined.
it's a good look
Then yesterday dawned bright, clear, and calm; as dramatic a difference as you could imagine. Still cold, though. The dogs were eager to get out, since after their morning walk Saturday they weren't able to go anywhere: we couldn't drive, since our little street was unplowed, and the sidewalks on the big street were worse than unplowed since the plow debris from the street left them completely impassible (and walking on the street didn't feel wise under the circumstances). They didn't mind too much—they mostly just hunkered down with their tails over their noses, like their wild cousins but on couches—but even though we still didn't have sidewalks Sunday morning they weren't going to wait any longer! Lucky we don't like too far from the woods.
so much energy to burn!
We didn't have the energy for sledding Sunday—plus we didn't want to face the hordes of Sunday sledders—but we're super looking forward to some fun times this week!