Snow Day

How was everybody’s snow day?

Yeah, mine pretty much sucked. Part of the problem was that yesterday was a half day for M, which in my school district means she was home around 10:45 am. Before that I’d been helping with a program at school from 8:45-10 am, so my day yesterday was basically shot, too. I’ve become completely spoiled now that the kids are in school. Back when they were little, I’d spend whole days working hard and accomplishing nothing. I’d forgotten how frustrating that can feel. So, I was too ambitious.

M and I decided to clean and reorganize her room for yesterday’s half-day, and it was vastly satisfying. She was actually excited, too.  Alas, it only occurred to me to do before-and-after pictures halfway through, so you don’t get the full effect of the cleanliness. Her previously-trashed closet looks fabulous now.

Just as M’s energy was waning I “let slip” that if we managed to finish in ten minutes we could rush over to Target to look for new baskets to replace the white wicker ones that were falling apart. She motivated and brought along her own cash to buy a little bathmat-sized rug to be part of her “living room” area (you can see a teensy bit of the rug below). We grabbed J from school on the way home.

Anyway, that was yesterday. We made the best of a little one-on-one time, we bonded, we completed a household task. All good.

And then there was today. When, after a lengthy session of snow-playing-and-clearing, J wanted to reorganize her room. Which was a freakin’ marathon.

I just thought that it wouldn’t ever end. We never got to the closet. She kept losing interest. My one serious triumph is that I managed to remove all the crappy-looking sticker remnants from the mirrors of her vanity (note me, hunched over, trying to get out of the picture and failing).

J completely lost steam and M was impatient and meanwhile much of the upstairs was trashed. We finally finished (mostly) and managed a promised sledding trip. I was sure that our local hill by the girls’ school would be packed, but it was sadly quiet.Which meant that instead of sitting on the sidelines with a book, I was going up and down the hill.

Earlier in the day we buried each other in the snow completely. Here’s M. On the way home from sledding, her favorite turquoise hat mysteriously disappeared. So if you live near me and see this hat emerge at spring thaw, could you please grab it?

And of course we forgot entirely about the usual homework assignments until after I’d promised the sledding, so that was a bit of a fraught fiasco. Meanwhile, it was still snowing–wasn’t it supposed to quit by noon?–so I spent an entire This American Life podcast snow blowing. And then I screwed up the dinner I was cooking. Oh, and did I mention that in the course of playing outside, cleaning like mad, and sledding down the street, I never managed to get out of my pajama pants?

Next snow day, I swear, I am planting those children in front of the television for the entire day.