Random musings on a snowy day

Amazing, the power of a day off. A little phone call at 6am took me straight from dreading and resenting yet another winter storm, to reveling in the 8-10 inches of white softness that once again blankets our yard. It is stunning, this snow. As long as I don't have to drive in it.

We've had a perfect snow day. Jackie bear has a bit of a cold, the kind of cold that allowed him to go to preschool yesterday but might have kept him home today. Thanks to the snow day, we didn't have to make the decision. Thanks to a sick boy, there was no pressure on the day. No need to get anything done, no feeling guilty about the 2 hours of PBS he watched this morning, and I stayed in my weird amalgam of workout clothes and PJs til 4:00pm. We sat around. We watched TV. We made pancakes. We folded laundry. In a fit of productivity, we swept and mopped the floors and then Nat cleaned the laundry room and thanks to his ministrations, I can begin to see a future in which my basement will not resemble the pits of hell. It's lovely.

In the basement work, Nat unearthed the table top we'd used for our dining room table in Winnipeg. We've had our big round table pushed into one corner of the dining room since our Valentine party two weeks ago; an awkward placement but we've been unable to let go of the delicious floor space it provided. The Winnipeg table is small and rectangular and, we realized, just about the same size as our window seat... What if, we mused, what if we had a smaller table in the dining room, and we didn't put it in the middle of the room. What if we put it by the window, by the window seat, even, and used the window seat as a, well, seat? Much assembling and disassembling later, and here it is, a happy little table enjoying the view out our front window, and a happy big open space where the kids spent the after-lunch hour playing contentedly. I am kind of loving it. Don't mind the string dangling from the light fixture. Much like a sticker on a plate glass window, it keeps things from running into the light. Things like Nat's head.



It's a work in progress. We've actually just ordered a pair of white Eames-ish shell chairs (similar to the black one you see here) which will go on the ends, as well as another wooden kid's chair for Miss Ive, which will go next to Jack's. I'm also going to cozy it up with a cushion on the window seat, and at some point we'll probably upgrade to a new table with the possibility of expanding and feeding more than 4 of us. But, it's the 4 of us most of the time, and this feels pretty right to me. We are embracing the fact that we have two kids in this house, and that those two kids have a lot of toys and need a lot of space. And that's just fine.

Here is Ivers enjoying the floor space. As well as attempting to steal the camera...