have I mentioned the cold and snow....?

The snow in the yard this morning...it is deep. Sometimes snow will drift, but the wind blows across the yard and the drift is on the other side of this table. It is just deep. And it is cold here....3 degrees (-16C). And the wind is blowing, it is snowing relentlessly over hour house, from the lake.



Marge is a saint today, Miss Margaret Cheryl...she is playing games with the crazy snowed in children. It is just too cold to send them outside, and we can't drive anywhere because the roads are terrible, with blowing snow and white-outs. There is simply nothing like driving down the road and not being able to see anything but white, guessing where the road is, then hearing that sound made only by tires in deeper snow signifying that you probably not exactly where you want to be. The plows try to keep up, but last night by the time we got home from the basketball game, our road had 6+ inches of new snow.

Anyway...Margaret is being very good to these guys. They already played Life, they ran around and got some energy out, now they are setting up Monopoly.


And....today, I made cake pops. The kids thought it was pretty cool. They had to wait for them to cool, then to harden...my niece's little boy is here, he was pretty diligent to check with me every five minutes or so to see if the were ready.

I asked them if they would like to ruin their dinner...they all said YES except for Camille, who voted to wait 'til after, but she joined us anyway. We played the game where I ask them a question before they can take one...

Let me say this: the cake had the rest of the melted chocolate on it...and tasted like one of those wonderfully disgusting Little Debbie cakes. I am just not one of those grown-ups who says, "Yuck, that's too sweet! Marshmallows, gross!" No, not me. I did have a little bit of cake, but not very much.

We are going to have spaghetti tonight...I'll skip the pasta, of course.

Tomorrow will be very cold again. It isn't supposed to get over like 6 degrees. Then Saturday, finally, it will be a bit warmer, but still freezing...then Sunday: perhaps over freezing!! Then...a new cold front is moving in....

I know, it's winter! It's normal! But this has been the coldest February in Syracuse since 1902, and out here, I dare say it is colder than in Syracuse, and we certainly get more snow.

Evelyn wants to go to the library. Well, not today, sweetheart. It's actually closed because of the weather. That doesn't happen very often. If they weren't on school break, they would be having snow days anyway.

Suri is eating a cake pop stick. (we took it from her) She is so stinkin' cute. She forgets how cold it is out there, and wants to go out, and seriously two minutes later the both of them are barking or jumping on the door to come back in. They come in all covered with snow...and we have to tell them to Lie Down, which means on the floor, which they KNOW. But Duke, he is a sneak. He ends up on the couch.

Ah well, the cook isn't coming tonight, and the housekeeper didn't show up either. We were to babysit a little friend of ours today, who is 18 months old. She was sick to her tummy just as her grandpa pulled into our driveway, and the roads were terrible, so Grandpa decided to cancel his appointment and just take sweetie back home...Margaret cleaned her up and put her in a dry shirt, while Grandpa ran in to use our bathroom quick...I had asked someone not half an hour ago to please clean up that bathroom...but all this person did was take out the garbage. rrr. It is like the dirty hair/emergency room rule: if your bathroom needs cleaning, someone will need to use it. And you can't very well say, "sure, just give me five minutes!", and go down the hall with the disinfectant spray and the paper towels.

So, since the cook isn't coming, and the teenagers have seemed to lost their interest in making dinner after the big chicken enchilada production the other night....

So off I go to make some dinner....