Snow days!

February is here.  

And is it lovely so far.

Last Sunday a gentle snowfall turned into a faster snowfall turned into 5 inches of fresh whiteness by bedtime and 10 inches by morning...

And a snow day!  

A snow day, on a Monday!  The best gift ever.  This wonderful gift of time, an extension of the weekend once you've already taken care of the weekend work.  A day just to play.

Why not start the day with Pokemon cards and Super Smash Bros?

 We ventured out into the snow for a playdate with friends.  Tramping and building and playing and then video games and lunch and time with sweet baby Indigo too. 

Back to real life on Tuesday for what felt like an exceedingly long 4 day week at school.   These weeks!  They are so busy.  The days fly. 

Ivy and Nat at least had a chance to slow life down, with a trip to the Botanical Gardens for Orchid Mania  

And then it was the weekend again.  Impossibly.  And Nat and I got the chance to slow life down, too.  Thanks to our friends who offered to take not one but BOTH of our darlings for an overnight, we had an evening out together. We went to the season opening party at MOCA and pretended to be hipsters even as we admitted we don't really care for modern art.  Except for the AWESOME video installation that we wandered into and then stayed to watch to the end.  We enjoyed it so much we came back to watch it again after we went for ice cream.  A bit of an odd date night, perhaps, standing in a dark room with a bunch of strangers, all slowly turning to watch 9 giant video screens showing solo musicians in different rooms of an old house, all playing a repetitive, two-line song over and over again for 64 minutes.  I don't think that description did it justice.  One guy played a guitar while soaking in a bathtub.  A couple old guys very slowly prepared and then fired a cannon.  Twice.  The song was haunting and beautiful with rising swells of crescendo and moments of contemplative silence.  Each musician was so intent, so inside themselves and their performance.  Yet the two pianos meshed their chords perfectly every time.  And at the end they all wandered off across a field and I wished I could go with them because we'd become friends, those Icelandic musicians and I.... Also, it was super fun to watch all the beautiful young modern-art-loving people turning and watching and being entranced and intrigued.

It's fun to go out on the town with my husband.  We live in a pretty neat town.

Today--swimming and sledding.  Can I brag for a minute and tell you about how well my children are swimming??  My boy-- he has got one mean backstroke.  Those long arms, shooting straight above his head.  So strong.  And the girl?  Today, just like that, she became an independent swimmer.  She's been doing a few pulls underwater since summer, but until today hadn't been able to come up for a breath without touching.  Now she can.  And suddenly she is a little enthusiastic fish, bobbing up to breathe, pushing off of us in deep water, heading fearlessly for the wall.  

They are so big.  I am so proud of them.

The weather is warming and rain is in the forecast for tomorrow. We thought we'd best get out and embrace winter a bit before the snow goes.  And then comes back again.   Cleveland, I tell ya.  Coventry Park obliged, the hill fast and smooth, happy children abounding, a field full of packing snow begging for snowmen.  Good times!

this little kid was the cutest, watching our group eagerly and then moving in to join the snowball fight,
 sweet face alight with the joy of it all.  

Tomorrow we have our Valentine's Extravaganza:  Second Sunday Soup meets glitter and doilies.   We have 6 dozen heart shaped cookies at the ready, and my office is stocked with sticker and pink and red paper and a lot of glue. Looking forward to filling the house with children and friends and enough glitter to drive Nat crazy for at least 6 months.

So far, there's a lot to love about February.  Apparently we are going to have 6 more weeks of winter this year.  If it is 6 more weeks like this one, I'll take it.