Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Silence is Golden

My house is quiet. It's an amazing sound. We've had days and weeks of snow, and sickness, and a revolving door of house guests that have led to not having a full, normal week back to the routines since before Christmas. I'm hoping this is our week to all be well and in school without weather interruptions. I mean it is mid-February, shouldn't we have at least one week of normal this winter?!

The snow days were quite fun though, and since everything shut down and the roads were covered with 7 inches of fluffy beautiful snow, J got to be home with us too. We had snowball fights, went sledding, made lots of comfort food (and ate way too much of it), read, attempted snowmen, watched movies, played board games, made rainbow looms galore, ate snow cream, and more. We really made the most of the time together and it was quite nice actually. I hear people on Facebook complain about too much togetherness, and sometimes I am right there with them; the kids are fighting, my patience is thin, but none of that happened this time and it was so nice. I'm calling it our Snowcation. Sure we lost a few scheduled school breaks including 2 Spring Break days, but we had an unplanned vacation at home to all be together and enjoy. Spring Break for us is a non-event this year anyway because it's Holy Week and we can't go anywhere since that's kind of the busiest week of the year for a clergy family. We tend to move our Spring vacation to another week and just pull the kids out of school for a few days. This year we're moving it to May and headed to Disney! I'm a little nervous about pulling A out at this time of year with testing and all but it'll be fine. I hope.

Ok, I'm off to enjoy the silence. Although I'm feeling a bit paralyzed by all the choices: do I take a walk, clean house, read, watch a show, go shopping, do yoga, or just sit and stare and listen to the silence?

Here's a look back at the fun we had last week:
My snow walk before kids came home for 3.5 snow days:


Then the snow really started falling and the fun began:








Wednesday, February 5, 2014

"Me Pray!"

Life is busy and good. Happy 2014 btw...
I want to write more but I have a few precious minutes in between kid-bed and me-bed, so this will be short, but I did want to share M's prayer at dinner tonight. Yes, you read that right, our 2 year old extemporaneously prays at dinner...is she a PK or what? 

First of all, she volunteered herself to pray:
Daddy: who wants to pray tonight?
M: me!
Daddy: ok, go ahead
M: Ank yoo God for food...famawee...A, H, mommy, daddy...(long pause where A volunteers help), yes! Gwacie! yes, (thinking...), Elmo, Daniel Tiger, yes! (We're trying to mouth amen)...Gram, papa, Amen. 

She knew exactly what she wanted to say and us rushing her along when she paused to say amen wasn't at all necessary. She was going to say amen when she was finished and how cute is that she's thanking God for her favorite tv shows?! Of course! Thank you God for Girls, Mad Men, Scandal, Friday Night Lights! For toe-tapping music, thought-provoking movies, and escape-to-another world books; and for all the other morsels of cultural contributions that bring us a bit of entertainment and relaxation. 

Amazing these little people.