I do love a good snow day. Admittedly, Pendleton County Schools tries to wear out the concept every winter, but that's not going to ruin it for me. Example: this past week, we got 3 inches of snow over a day and a half, beginning Monday night. School was closed from Tuesday through Friday. Personally, I think they closed it on Friday because they knew nothing would get accomplished anyway, but that's just me.
Some parents hate snow days, but once again, I think these are parents of those freakishly well behaved children who handle school a heck of a lot better than mine does. I look at snow days as an opportunity to 1) continue to try to talk my children into acting like they love each other, and 2) try to freeze them half to death.A typical snow day for us involves waking up at 7:00 a.m. (The "sleeping in" gene lies dormant until the teenage years, I swear.) We have a mini-war over breakfast, since I have decided to put my family through sugar detox this January. Charlie is one of those "super-tasters" that you hear about, or maybe he's just OCD. He won't eat scrambled eggs, but he will eat scrambled egg whites... if and only if said egg whites have no brown on them. I tried explaining to him that when you cook something in a skillet with butter, it gets brown. He responded by gagging and yakking a little bit on his plate. I can't beat that argument, honestly.
Breakfast over (thank heaven) the boys play a bit while I do some chores. Translation: I try to do dishes while Charlie and Abraham cover ever square millimeter of the floor of the house with cars, blocks, and miscellaneous McDonald's Happy Meal toys that can never be throw away because when they get within a three foot radius of the garbage can, they magically become Charlie's Favorite Toy Ever. This activity degrades into bickering, and I decide that it's time to go outside. Outside is good. Outside, we sled down the hill. Charlie alone on the sled catches major air. Awesome! Outside, we can't quite scrape together enough for a snowman, so we make a snow midget instead.
Outside, I take a lot of pictures. Outside, we trek over to the neighbor's not-finished-but-filled-with-rainwater pond and throw large rocks at the ice. This amuses small boys endlessly, trust me. It doesn't last quite as long for me, though. So we get in the car and... Outside, we go see what the creek looks like in winter. It's beautiful, but I must have a hypothermia wish.
Time to go home and have some hot chocolate? No. Charlie wants.... ice cream! Bargaining ensues. We end up having a snack that is perhaps not exactly healthy but will not result in me having to scrape them off of the ceiling. By now it is roughly 6:00 PM, and bedtime is 8:30. So the boys do what makes perfect sense at this point in the day: start building a really elaborate train track on the kitchen floor where the table is supposed to sit. They get 3/4 done when Daddy comes home. We all pile on top of him, scramble around for supper, crash out in the living room, wander off to bed. The dishes aren't done. The train track is under the table. The living room floor is covered in cars and blocks. I'm lucky if I remembered to put away the left-overs from dinner. I call that a good day.
