Snow, snow, snow

Icicles and snowdrifts

Our kitchen window, nearly blocked by snow.

This morning, after only about half of the new snow; Michael digging out.

Stay tuned for how it looks tomorrow, after a night of high winds and blowing snow!

Boys sledding

Snowapalooza! This is what it looked like this morning around 8:30 am, and it kept on snowing all day. I don't even know how deep it is now.

It takes a village

It's turned out (so far) being pretty great raising kids in the middle of a small but dense city. We thought it would be a big sacrifice for the kids not having a lot of nature to run around in, but so far at least the city has many compensations. For last few months I have let Henry play outside unsupervised. He's trustworthy, knows not to go into the street, and stays near our house if he's out front or plays in our backyard or that of our wonderful neighbors next door. This has been great for him; he spends hours outside doing all sorts of things. We also let him run ahead of us (or sometimes go all alone) to Gran's house; there are no streets to cross. Bad things could happen; he could be snatched by a bad guy, or a million other nightmares could occur. But I weigh those remote negatives against the evident positives of Henry's independence and freedom and self-confidence. A square block of 40 or so houses is vast universe for a small boy.

Two incidents in the last week have been cause for reflection. On Sunday, the phone rang and it was David, the guy who owns the hair salon and photo studio on the corner. He wanted to tell us that he was putting out a sign and closing his sidewalk because he was afraid of the potential for falling ice and snow from his roof. He wanted us to know because he often sees Henry running by his shop on the way to Gran's, and Henry knows he can't read! Then last week, about 3 in the afternoon on a sunny day, the doorbell rang and I could see it was a middle-school kid from the nearby school. I figured he were selling something for fund-raising, but instead he asked me, "Is your son playing outside?" He and his two friends rang the bell because they saw Henry and were concerned that he was maybe too young to be outside by himself and they were worried he might follow them home. One piped up, "He said that tree was his house!"

When incidents like these happen, my first instinct is to feel shame and embarrassment that these other people think I'm a bad mom (and when middle-school boys are concerned about your parenting, that's a bad sign!). But my second thought is to damp down those fears and instead feel gratitude for a community of people who care about my child. Maybe they think he should be inside, but what's most important is that they are watching out for him. I thanked those boys for their care and concern. It is pretty remarkable that they would ring a stranger's doorbell out of concern for another child. Bad things can always happen, and I don't feel 100% easy about my "free-range parenting." But I do feel proud of Henry's maturity, independence, and skills in navigating the world. And I feel good that so many people seem to watching out for him too.

Teething misery, and LOTS of snow

Doesn't she look miserable?

Well, she's sweet and smiling in this photo, but poor Agatha has had a rough three days bringing in her upper molars. Thursday she actually fell asleep on the living room floor, she was so wiped out, and while her night sleep has been fine, her naps have been messed up and she has been cranky and whiny and miserable. She barely ate yesterday, but thankfully by this afternoon she was clearly better. She ate well and was back to toddling around and getting into stuff like her old self (The past three days she barely allowed me to put her down. I had a lot of kinks to work out in yoga this morning!) When she woke up from her nap, I was nursing her and Michael and I were going over our coming week together, and she started to get upset and say, "car! car!" I thought she was hearing us and thinking one of us was going to leave, so I assured her that no one was going anywhere-- and she just got madder. I finally figured out that SHE wanted to go somewhere in the car. "Want to go to Lowe's?" Michael asked. "Loooow," she answered, reaching out to him. (Michael says she had a great time, and that when she was ready to go she said "Low, out!")

The reason Agatha was stir-crazy this afternoon is that we woke up to about a foot of snow on Saturday morning, and it just kept snowing right through the middle of the afternoon. Our second huge snowstorm of the year! The past few years we haven't had any storms like this, so Mom is really getting a nice welcome to Pennsylvania. It was a very well-behaved storm, though; gave plenty of warning and happened on a Friday night, leaving us plenty of time to dig out before Monday morning. It is beautiful, and Henry has had a great time in it.

Despite some crankiness with Agatha, we had a lovely weekend. Nothing like being snowed in to make you feel like you're on a little vacation; we watched an Elmo movie in the middle of the day and built a lego city in the middle of the living room. We made brownies and ate them all. And Henry learned to love his snowpants, which for a boy who only recently deigned to wear a coat, is quite a triumph!
Elmo-related postscript: the reason we went looking for Elmo on Netflix is that Agatha was gifted with an Elmo doll that sings and talks when you sit him on his little potty. Despite the fact that the batteries ran out almost immediately and Elmo no longer sings, she knows the "la la, la LA" Elmo song and sings it herself when she sees him or a potty.

Desultory blogging

Morning granola

I see that I only made 9 posts in January, the fewest of any month so far. Lazy! I'll try to be better. Things we've been doing: ordering seeds for the spring garden, and having the occasional wild rumpus...

Setting up a little play-kitchen area in the kitchen...

And making books about army battles. This one is from today (Henry informed us that this is the title page). He wrote the first two lines himself; altogether it reads "Henry Army Guys [RME GIS]; I did this at my house." He got confused about whether he was trying to say "I did it" or "I did this," and then he got frustrated and asked for me to spell the last phrase out for him. He sometimes wants to try to read books like Hop on Pop with us, but he generally doesn't want to do something until he's good at it, so I think he's working on reading quietly, on his own. I can hear the echo of his good teacher, Meghan, when he says things like "Mom, there's a silent S in this word; you can't hear it; we say [whatever] but it's spelled like..."

Michael and Henry also like to "play apes" (inspired by watching Planet of the Apes), which entails sneaking around with their nerf guns hiding from me until Agatha outs them. Agatha, meanwhile, just keeps getting more fun. She's said Dada for a long time, but now she more often says "da-ee" (Daddy) and says Mama frequently, too. Her sound for nursing has long been "liddle liddle," but now she'll say "Mama liddle liddle." She loves to say hi and bye-bye to people she meets, and has more words all the time, including "hot tea!" and "nut ball!"-- the latter is one of her favorite snacks, a pre-chewed ball of walnuts. Yum! (Actually, she says it more like "butt ball!") When she wants to eat, she says "bowl!" and when she wants more of something she holds out her bowl and says "peees?" Which is pretty much irresistible. (I credit her babysitter for teaching her this.) She also sometimes says "hat bowl" and then proceeds to dump her food over her head. We've gotten quicker about intervening as soon as she makes the announcement, and now she sometimes says "hat bowl" just to get a rise out of us. She still loves cats and birds, which she fluently names "caw caw," although now she also knows hummingbirds (by their picture) and likes to say "humming!" She also knows when she has two of something; if you give her a cracker she'll agitate for another one and then say, "two!"

Freakish coincidence

I was wondering when exactly it was that Henry first used the toilet, and the good thing about this blog is that I can go back and check. I did: It was January 17, 2009. And the first day Agatha peed in her potty? January 17, 2010.

Chow Dogs

The kids have been astounding me lately with the amount of food they are consuming. Since Michael and I can put it away too, this has meant that lots of calories are being bought, prepared, and ingested in our house. This week I made a simple dinner of pasta with tomato sauce and a large bowl of salad. An entire pound of whole-wheat rigatoni was consumed-- there were maybe six sad-looking noodles in the bowl at the end of the meal (plus the salad!). Yesterday I made an enormous pot of vegetarian curry, and had lots of leftovers for today-- so I thought. But here's what Henry ate today (as far as I know): Breakfast-- one bowl of grape nuts, one bowl of oatmeal. Cup of milk. Lunch-- three bowls of curry with rice. Snack at Gran's house-- whole apple, two Hershey's kisses. Dinner-- two bowls of curry, two bowls of fruit cocktail, four bowls of rigatoni with pesto. Yikes!