The Long Winter

Posted on February 8, 2010 by Steph

On Friday morning, around ten o’ clock, I sent Beth the following email: “It’s started. Right on time. I’m going to take June for a walk in the falling snow when Sesame St. ends. Wish you were here.” A big snowstorm was predicted to start at ten and it did, pretty much right on the dot. At first it was just tiny scattered flakes. If I didn’t know that 20-28 inches were predicted I would have thought it was a passing snow squall. By the time June and I got home, around noon, the snow was falling harder, in bigger flakes and the sidewalk was wet with melting snow; it didn’t really start to stick to the streets and sidewalks until three and the busy road where we live was passable until early evening. I ordered our traditional Friday evening pizza a half hour earlier than usual, just in case, but I didn’t need to; it came a half hour early, too.

Both Noah and Beth were home earlier than usual. Noah had an early dismissal and got home just before one and Beth was giving a presentation at the National Labor College (http://www.nlc.edu/) that wrapped up around five. After a quick stop at the grocery store for essentials (like chocolate chips), she was home shortly before six and we settled in to eat our pineapple and mushroom pizza and watch the snow come down.

Beth slipped out of bed at 5:00 a.m. on Saturday morning to go sit on the porch and watch the snow. She said it was falling so hard it looked like someone was pouring sand out of a bucket. At 7:15, I measured 19.5 inches on the glass table in our backyard. (I’d cleared an inch or so of snow and ice off of it on Friday afternoon, so we could get an accurate measurement.)

It has been an extraordinarily snowy winter here for us in Maryland (and in most of the mid-Atlantic region as well). We had eighteen inches back in December and then just in the past week and a half, we’d had a six-inch snowfall, followed by another inch or two and that’s just the ones I remember. It’s all kind of blur now. I don’t think there’s been a day since mid-December when I haven’t seen snow, if only those big, black mounds in apartment complex parking lots. Before today, Noah had already had four snow days, a two-hour delay and an early dismissal and June had been out of school five days. It seems like they hardly ever go to school any more and it was already feeling like a very long winter even before this storm hit. Although I must say that despite the fact that a few of my friends have already joked about this, I don’t think we’ll be forced to venture out into a blizzard with Alamanzo in search of the hidden cache of wheat for the starving townspeople or make kindling from hay twists.

But this storm was The Big One. I put up a poll on my Facebook page on Friday asking my friends when they thought public schools would re-open and how many inches we’d get. Answers ranged from Tuesday to the whole week off and from 19-26 inches. By the time the skies cleared and the snow stopped falling around five Saturday afternoon, we had 24 1/4 inches on what my friend the Yellow Gingko’s mom dubbed “The Official D.C. Area Weather Table Out Back.” (She had the closest guess on that part of the poll, too.)

Unfortunately, it was not a very good snow for playing, at least on Saturday: too powdery for packing and approximately two-thirds as tall as June. It was almost impossible for her to walk in it. Beth tried to clear a shallower play space in the front yard for her and Noah made a valiant attempt to create a packed-down sledding trough on the hill in the back yard, but neither of them had much success. June declared the snow “too tall” and I had to agree. There is such a thing as too much snow. It had been easier for the kids to play in the inch or so we’d had in the yard before the snow started falling on Friday.

Beth started shoveling Saturday morning and I took a turn in the afternoon. The snow was so deep that when you created little hollows or cracks with the edge of shovel the light inside was turquoise. As I turned the corner of our lot, I noticed that in contrast to the bright white of the snow topping the fence, the peeling paint on it that normally appears white was now the palest blue-gray. Everything was eerily transformed by the snow. The mailbox seemed to wear a white Russian-style fur hat. The trees were frosted and the smaller ones were bent over, creating a dome-like effect. The seven snowmen we already had in the yard were either mysterious obelisks rising from the snow or had been completely obliterated by it.

Sunday dawned sunny and sparkly. Beth and I finished shoveling the sidewalk. The very last part was a shoulder-high, compacted drift created by neighbors who plowed the contents of their driveway onto our walk. I thought it was too tall and too packed and that we would have to just leave it on the sidewalk, but once we had the rest of the walk clear, it was too tempting to try to finish the job. Beth worked on one side and I worked on the other until it was demolished. The path we created was narrow, but it’s possible to walk down it single file. Unfortunately it’s not wide enough for stroller traffic (which I regret as a stroller user), but I might widen it in the days or weeks to come, as I don’t think the snow will be melting any time soon. We’re not supposed to get temperatures topping 35 degrees until Thursday and it’s supposed to snow again Tuesday night.

While we were digging out Sunday morning, we hired a man who was walking down the street with a shovel to clear our driveway, a job that’s beyond either of our capabilities. At first he said $50, then he took a look at the driveway, saw how very long it is and said $100, which seemed fair to us, and then he came to the door with the job mostly done and revised his price to $125 for the work already completed or $140 to finish the last little bit left cutting off the driveway from the street. Beth gave him $125 and sent him on his way; we resolved the break the barrier ourselves.

After lunch, Noah went out to play in the snow and had fun crawling around in the cave under the glass table and working on his sledding trough. “It’s awesome out there,” he reported on coming inside. Xander, the more adventurous of our two cats, did a little exploring, too, though he had his ears back for much of the time he was walking in the snow.

Later in the afternoon I took June for a walk. I pulled her down a partially plowed side street in her sled. (I formulated this plan when the street was completely unplowed but packed down by cars and June was so enchanted with it she was loathe to give it up once we were faced with a lot of bare asphalt.) Then I pulled her along the footpath that goes by the creek to the playground, stopping along the way to skirt the stand of bamboo totally bent over by the snow and the big tree blocking the path, and detouring onto a footbridge to admire the frozen creek.

We made it to the playground where I pushed June on the swings. I was unused to standing so high up and I started out too close to the swings and ended up getting kicked in the chin. We didn’t stay at the playground long, but it was too long nevertheless. I had to take June’s boots off so I could extricate her from the bucket swing and we never got one of them back on securely so it filled with snow and her mittens soaked through, too. When she urgently declared, “My fingers are frozen!” I knew we needed to get home right away, so I said one time down the tunnel slide and then we were leaving. It was icy inside and she shot through landing on her belly in the snow and cried “That was fun!” As we started back, June observed in a worried tone that Noah says when your fingers freeze they turn black. Leave it to Noah to fill her head with troubling facts about frostbite, I thought.

Once we were off the creek path, June had to walk because I just couldn’t pull the sled any longer on the street. She started to cry that she couldn’t do it, that she was too cold, so I stripped off her wet mittens and gave her my gloves, which calmed her down a little. She cried intermittently until we were almost home and I was able to distract her with the sight of a downed tree lying across three cars and a taxi stranded in the middle of a busy street (presumably since Friday or Saturday based on the amount of snow covering it). But a few houses from ours she started sobbing and I abandoned the sled and carried her the rest of the way home, leaving Beth to undress her while I went back for the sled. After a warm, rose-scented bubble bath she was in better spirits. I decided a bath would do my sore arms and back good, so I had one, too.

School’s already cancelled for today and tomorrow, with the rest of the week up for grabs. Who knows when the school bus will next pull up to our curb or when the Purple School will open its doors? But we’ve had uninterrupted heat and electricity unlike many of our neighbors and we’re eating well– spinach-black bean burritos, chocolate-butterscotch chip cookies, homemade waffles, vegetable-white bean soup with whole wheat parmesan rolls– so I won’t complain. We’re lucky that Beth also has the day off today (along with many other D.C. worker bees) and she even was able to get out and do the week’s grocery shopping. Update to follow…

For more pictures of The Big One, click here: http://picasaweb.google.com/loveladyallen/February672010?authkey=Gv1sRgCIbY5dDUwIvxYA&feat=directlink

Holly Jolly

Posted on December 19, 2009 by Steph

The Radio Shack receipt was for $38.87. I stared at it uncomprehendingly. The remote-control trucks June had selected for Noah’s Christmas present were $14.99, a surprisingly good price, and when the clerk suggested batteries, I agreed, not sure what kinds we had at home. Almost immediately I was chastising myself for saying yes. Surely there’s a huge mark-up on batteries at Radio Shack. But $38.87? The batteries couldn’t be that expensive. Then I noticed the trucks had rung up at $24.99.

I told the clerk the shelf tag said $14.99 and added that the trucks had been sitting behind that shelf tag for at least two days. I knew because I’d been in the store by myself on Wednesday morning while June was at school, looking for appropriate gifts to suggest to her. The clerk was unmoved. He didn’t even apologize for the shelving error. (If it was an error, I thought–I was getting irate and uncharitable.)

I felt a deep weariness settle over me. It had taken forever to get rung up despite the fact that the line was short. Before the price dispute, the clerk had been chatty and over-friendly, full of tips on how to manipulate my husband into getting me what I want for Christmas (perhaps a new computer from Radio Shack?). I never know how to come out in situations like this and sometimes I just don’t. Eventually I lay my left hand with its bare ring finger conspicuously on the counter, hoping he’d see it, take me for a straight single mom and just be quiet already. But he didn’t.

I was not going to walk out of the store with almost $40 worth of trucks and batteries as a present to Noah from June. That much was clear. Most of the presents I’ve been purchasing on her behalf have been very inexpensive, most close to $5, so $15 was a stretch as it was. I asked the clerk to refund my money and he did. We went back to the shelves and I gave June a few more options. She refused them all. She liked the trucks. She didn’t like the blue car or the silver car or the little cars that ran around a track. I gave up and we left the store empty-handed.

I thought she might be more amenable to my position after a snack, so we went to Starbucks next. As her spoon scraped the bottom her yogurt parfait, I broached the subject. Would she like to go back to the store and reconsider? No, she would not. I wondered desperately how we ever got through the beginning gift-giving stage with Noah, when the child is old enough to have some responsibility for reciprocating gifts but too young to make rational choices. The problem is I want it all: I want her to pick gifts (or at least pick from several choices I give her), to pick gifts the recipients would like (had I been willing to buy a light-up Cinderella figurine for Noah we could have gotten out of there with a gift) and to pick affordable presents, too. It’s too much to orchestrate, but I wasn’t sure what needed to give.

“Where are we going now?” June wanted to know as I pushed the stroller away from Starbucks.

“Home, I guess,” I said. “I don’t have any other ideas. We’ll have to think of something later because if we don’t, Noah won’t have any presents from you and that would be sad.”

“But I got him a book,” June piped up.

“What book?” I said. Did Beth help her pick a book for Noah? But she would have mentioned it if she had, because she knew I was taking June to get his present that morning.

“The book I got him at the store at the beach,” June said impatiently. Then it hit me. The limerick book! I even blogged about it not two weeks ago. I didn’t know whether to be hugely relieved or irritated I’d made not one but two completely unnecessary trips to this shopping center looking for a gift I had already bought. I settled on relieved. I still had two more “from June” gifts to buy for other people so one down was good, no matter how it came to pass.

We came home, I ate lunch (June passed, having just eaten that big yogurt) and I put June down for her nap. The babysitter arrived while she was sleeping and I set off for Noah’s school’s Holiday Sing. That morning he’d been excited about it and practicing a selection of the Kwanza, Hanukah and Christmas songs. (He also invented a pirate version of “Holly Jolly Christmas” for his own and June’s amusement. Sample lyric: “Ho, Ho, the mistletoe, hung where ye can see. Somebody waits for ye. Kiss her once for me!”)

As I walked along the side of the school, I could hear the pianist practicing “Holly Jolly Christmas.” I had a moment of panic, thinking what if it wasn’t practice. What if I had the time of the concert wrong? I knew “Holly Jolly Christmas” was the last song on the program. But when I arrived ten minutes before concert time, there were parents milling around and the multipurpose room (the cafeteria is often pressed into service as an auditorium so they call it the multipurpose room) was not even set up. I hadn’t missed a thing. Parents helped set up folding chairs in the back of the room, finishing just as the kids filed in. As I was waiting outside the room, I was happy to see Beth walk down the hall. I didn’t know if she would be able to make it.

“You made it,” said and then I saw her face. “What’s wrong?” I asked. There was a nursery school fundraising crisis involving addresses on letters that don’t line up with the windows in the envelopes. Plus she had been handed a huge unexpected project at work that might mean working on vacation next week. She was anxious and overwhelmed.

The sing-along was cute, as usual. I could tell Beth was distracted, though, and when Noah’s class came in we waved at him but he didn’t see us. I knew if he didn’t see us then, he never would because the 4th and 5th grade choir faces the audience but the rest of the kids sit on the floor and face the choir. I was sad about that. He always lights up when he sees us at school events. Telling him we were there later just isn’t the same.

We made it home before June woke from her nap. Beth spent the afternoon in a frantic effort to get letters re-printed while I watched the kids. Just before six, we piled into the car and drove to the community center for June’s school’s Solstice Party. We paraded from the Community Center to the library with the children all wearing paper crowns and holding their glowing, painted paper-wire-and-wood lanterns they made at school. (Noah, along with other older siblings, carried his old lantern.) We sang “This Little Light of Mine” as we marched. Inside the library we feasted on pizza, crudités, hummus, oranges and a wide variety of homemade sweets. Noah, June and I sat with the Yellow Gingko’s family. Beth sequestered herself in a corner, assembling the re-printed fundraising packets for people to collect at the end of the evening. I brought her a plate of food but she was afraid food wasn’t allowed in that room, so I took it away.

After we ate each class presented the teachers with gifts and there was a shadow puppet show (to celebrate shadow at this, the darkest time of the year). The Tracks class (four and five year olds) gathered behind the screen and held up their puppets as Lesley read a story about a magically expanding mitten that shelters a whole forest of animals. At one point the Red Maple (last year’s Caterpillar) rushed the stage (he wanted to see what was going on behind it) and he had to be snagged back by the Blue Gingko’s dad, who assured him it would be his turn to be in the puppet show next year. Next the classes gathered together and greeted the other classes. And then it was time to go home.

Of course, the evening wouldn’t have been complete without another snafu. Some people took the wrong packets with them on their way out. Beth was beyond frustrated.

But it was the eve of the biggest December snowfall in the history of the Washington region and Beth loves snow about as much as I love the beach. We woke this morning to seven inches of pristine, white snow. It snowed all day and by evening, we had eighteen and half inches on our patio table. Beth took the kids out to play and then Noah spent a good bit of the day sledding with Sasha’s family and then again in our backyard. June tramped around in snow up to her waist and enjoyed sledding down our little hill, crying “Again! Again! Again!” When she was too cold to continue, I snuggled with her under blankets and we read six of the seven Curious George stories in The Complete Adventures of Curious George. Later in the day, I took her out in the snow again. Beth designed and printed our holiday cards and heroically shoveled the walk (two times!). I made some very tasty bulgur burgers and roasted potatoes for dinner.

When I went into the kids’ room to tuck June in, I found her kneeling on the bed, looking out at the snow through parted curtains. Even with the frustrating shopping outing and mounting work and school committee stress, it was still a holly jolly two days.

And February Was So Long That It Lasted Into March: A Photo Essay

Posted on March 3, 2009 by Steph

And February was so long that it lasted into March
And found us walking a path alone together.
You stopped and pointed and you said, “That’s a crocus,”
And I said, “What’s a crocus?” and you said, “It’s a flower,”
I tried to remember, but I said, “What’s a flower?”

From “February,” by Dar Williams
http://www.poplyrics.net/waiguo/darwilliams/006.htm

So we had this…weather yesterday I don’t even want to talk about, but here are some pictures. Noah measured seven and a half inches on the picnic table out back, the most accumulation we’ve had at once in June’s life. Our crocuses are buried.

Beth took a personal day. Sasha came over at ten and stayed most of the day. Beth took them sledding on the hill behind the hospital. (Noah’s verdict: “Going down that super steep hill really rocked.”) I took an almost two hour walk with June. She alternated riding in her sled and stomping along in her boots and only did a full face plant into the white stuff once. Beth and June were out playing in the yard until well after dark. Hot chocolate and homemade potato-parsnip soup and chocolate chip cookies were made. Noah’s back in school after a two-hour delay this morning. It’s frigid today, 14 degrees right now so I don’t expect much to melt right away.

On Sunday, in anticipation of the storm, Beth bought me some yellow daffodils (my favorite flower) to cheer me up. I’m making spaghetti with asparagus for dinner tonight. Seventeen days until spring…

Good Sledding

Posted on January 28, 2009 by Steph

The second snow day is always harder than the first one. I considered this fact this morning as I stumbled out of the bedroom at 6:40, bound for the bathroom, and Beth said, “School’s cancelled again.” It wasn’t exactly unexpected. An ice storm had been predicted, ice on top of the inch of snow that cancelled school yesterday. Since Monday was a teacher grading and planning day (there’s one at the end of every marking period), this was Noah’s third consecutive day off school and my third day of trying to figure out how to entertain both kids all day.

Tuesday was pretty easy. Both kids were thrilled to see our first significant snowfall since last winter. “There’s snow on the ground today!” June kept saying and running to the windows to check and make sure it was still there. We played in the yard. Noah and I pulled June around in her sled and I pushed her down the hill over and over. We made snowballs and threw them at the fence. (Noah devised a complicated scoring system depending on where they landed. He had some trouble deciding if the one that soared over the fence counted as landing between the pillars and over the crossbar, the prime target. In the end, he decided it did. “Well, it did go over the bar,” he reasoned.) We went to the library’s Circle Time where Noah was good-natured about doing the hoky-poky and playing Ring Around the Rosie with a bunch of toddlers, preschoolers and their out-of-school older siblings. Then we walked home in the snow. After Mr. Rogers, lunch and a nap, June was eager to go outside and play in the snow all over again, so Noah watched her while I shoveled as much of the walk as I could. It had gotten packed down and heavy in places so I only managed the front sidewalk. (We have a corner lot.) Then we came in and had hot chocolate. In between, I clipped newsletters, folded laundry and made squash risotto for dinner. The only thing I hoped to do and didn’t was make cookies.

This morning when I went outside for the paper (which had not arrived), I found the yard slick with ice. I wondered how feasible outside play would be, but I decided to give it a try. June’s music class was cancelled so we had nowhere to go. Also, June was running around the house beside herself with excitement that there was still snow on the ground and wanting to know when she could go outside. I gave her a bath, then unloaded the dishwasher and did the breakfast dishes while I waited for her hair to dry. This was a nearly unbearable delay for June, who kept letting me know she was ready to “go outside and take a walk in the snow.” I decided a walk was a good idea. It would be pretty down by the creek. It always is after an ice storm. June also expressed interest in riding in her sled instead of the stroller. If the sidewalks were unshoveled, as the path by the creek surely would be, it might actually be easier, I thought.

I took a peek down the block. Some of our neighbors had managed to shovel, but mostly I saw ice. As I fetched June’s sled and tried to chip the ice off it, the kids had fun walking around in the yard, delighting in its new texture and stomping their boots to crack the ice and sink into the snow underneath. I ran back inside for a towel so June wouldn’t be sitting directly on the ice I couldn’t remove from the sled and off we went. I pulled, June rode and Noah alternately darted ahead and fell behind. He had a yellow plastic baseball bat with which he was shattering the ice on every surface that captured his attention.

We didn’t make it very far down the creek path. We kept finding fun places to play, like the stand of bamboo weighted down with ice and leaning over the path to form a green, leafy cave. Then Noah found a leaf frozen into a chunk of ice and decided it was the fossil of an ancient plant. For a while after that we were archaeologists excavating gemstones (creek rocks) from the ice. We found a snowman someone must have made yesterday and Noah donated his leaf-in-ice, which was now a feathered hat for it. We threw rocks into the creek. Landing in open water was good if the splash was big enough; cracking the thin ice rimming the creek was better. I ran down the path in short bursts, pulling the sled while June called out for me to go “faster and faster.” Around 9:45 I declared it was time to turn around and head home, much to both kids’ dismay. It’s always hard to pick the going-home time that won’t result in chilled and tired kids whining all the way and I thought this was it.

As we neared home, we passed a man walking down the cleared street in the opposite direction. He wanted to know if was very slippery on the sidewalk. I nodded. “Good sledding,” I replied. On getting back inside the house, June and I watched Sesame Street. Noah stayed outside whacking ice with the bat for another ten minutes before joining us. I made hot chocolate for everyone again. Noah passed the rest of the morning playing on one computer while June and I looked at photo albums on the other one. Then Noah started whining because he was having trouble with the animation on the Power Point presentation about the evolution of language that he’s working on for a school project so I suggested he break for lunch.

After lunch I was trying to sneak in a little work time while the kids played in the living room, but on hearing both of them screaming, I came in and scooped June up without asking either of them what had happened. “It sounds like nap time to me,” I told her. She wailed even louder, but after a story and a brief cuddle, she was sound asleep. I read Noah part of a chapter of Me and My Little Brain and left him to finish it on his own. Noah reads a few years above grade level, but he’s always preferred adults to read to him. We have a new system for reading now in which he reads ten pages of each chapter on his own. Yesterday, he got so engrossed he went ahead and read an entire extra chapter on his own.

After nap I’d hoped to play outside again or maybe shovel part of the sidewalk I hadn’t done yesterday, but a cold rain was falling so I just cleared the parts of the front sidewalk that had iced over again. (Beth salted the walk before leaving for work and that helped a little.) I went back inside. The kids had started fighting again in the five minutes I’d been outside.

“Who wants to make cookies?” I asked. This was my ace in the hole, but Noah was uninterested. June wanted to help, though, so she sat on the kitchen floor and mixed the dough for Lebanese sesame seed biscuits and then stacked dominos into towers while I rolled the balls of dough into strips, twisted them into spirals, glazed them with milk and sprinkled them with seeds.

Around 5:15, June was asking to “go and take a walk on the ice.” I told her it was raining and cold and “yucky” outside. “You don’t want to go out there,” I said.

“Is it really, really yucky?” she asked, skeptically. I promised she could play outside again tomorrow. I don’t think it will all melt by then. I hope not. When the sun went down this afternoon, it stained our white yard all pink. It looked like strawberry yogurt, or frosting on a birthday cake. We really don’t see that particular sight often enough.

I do hope there’s school tomorrow, though. The kids are getting on each other’s nerves and I’d welcome a return to our normal routine. It hasn’t been all rough sledding, though. Some of it was pretty good.

44 Centimeters – Postscript

Posted on February 28, 2007 by Steph

Shortly after we got completely cleaned up from the ice storm another one was predicted, but instead we got four and a half inches of fluffy, wet snow, perfect snowman snow. It fell on a Sunday so Beth got a chance to play with Noah in it and construct their snow-Beth (his idea) after we all took a walk down by the creek. While they worked on it, I nursed June to warm her up from our walk, and then made grilled cheese, soup and hot chocolate for everyone else. Later on, Noah and Beth made oatmeal cookies. I fully expected a snow day on Monday, but we got off with a two-hour delay. That morning before school, Noah and I repaired the melting snow-woman, removing the glasses and giving her long hair made of sticks, turning it into a snow-Steph. Noah sledded a bit and I dragged a beaming June around the yard in circles in the little pink sled. Winter does have its pleasures, but two days later when June and I were on our way to pick Noah up at school, I glanced at the path by the creek and saw a forest of purple crocuses, growing where there had been none the day before. I was so happy I gasped out loud.

44 Centimeters, or Back to Normal

Posted on February 20, 2007 by Steph

Miracle of miracles, the bus came and Noah got on it, with his backpack full of overdue valentines and his feet protected from the slush only by a pair of canvas sneakers. It was a gym day so he needed the sneakers and we decided if we sent him in boots carrying his sneakers it would be the last we’d see of either the boots or the sneakers. He’s like that. Already this year he has lost his lunch box more times than I can count and his winter coat as well. We got the coat back from the lost and found, but not before we’d bought him a new one. He drives his kindergarten teacher to distraction losing his crayons. One recent morning he lost his sock between getting it out of his sock drawer and getting it onto his foot. I have to accept some genetic blame for this. I am much the same way.

A couple hours after Noah left, June and I needed to get on our own bus, headed downtown to the pediatrician to get her head measured. At her nine-month appointment, the doctor noticed her soft spot had closed early and asked us to come by in mid-February to make sure her skull was growing properly. This had created a subtle but steady undercurrent of worry for me ever since. Beth researched early fontanel closure on the Internet and came back with worst-case scenarios of brain damage and brain surgery. Even though I knew chances were she’d be fine, believed it even, throughout January and February, every now and then I kissed the top of June’s head, feeling the softness of her baby-fine strawberry blonde hair and the warmth of her skull beneath my lips and I hoped no-one would have to cut it open.

We were ready early because instead of taking her usual hour-plus morning nap, June slept only twenty minutes, then drowsed for another ten while I held her and sang and tried to get her back to sleep. Once it was clear neither of us was getting any more sleep, I got up and folded some laundry. Then we went outside and I tried to shovel the sidewalk. It’s a point of honor with Beth (both of us really) to keep the walks clear in inclement weather, and while she got the walk in front of the house finished before everything froze solid, we didn’t get to the walk on the side of the house in time and it was covered in thick ice for a week. In the warmer weather we’d had for the past twenty-four hours, it had begun to thaw. I chipped away at it for ten minutes, clearing less than a quarter of it. By then my arms were sore and June (parked in the stroller next to me) was whining and it was almost time to catch the bus so I called it quits, resolving to finish the next day after it got softer. I was pleased to see even that short stretch of clear cement. It seemed like a step in the right direction, back toward normalcy.

At the pediatrician, the nurse called June’s name only twenty minutes after our appointment time. I am so used to marathon waits there I didn’t even hear her the first time and she had to call again. Once we were settled in the examination room, she asked why we were there and I said for a head measurement. The nurse called out to another nurse outside the room, asking if she should do it or wait for the doctor. The second nurse told the first one, rather sharply, that Dr. Ariza would do it. I wasn’t surprised. Dr. Ariza had been quite insistent at June’s nine-month appointment that the head measurement was to be done by a doctor. We waited another ten minutes for Dr. Ariza. I held June and read her an assortment of board books that were lying around. When the doctor came in, she asked how June was doing. I reported she’d learned to crawl since her last appointment and was standing unassisted. She nodded approvingly. I mentioned she’d had a cold for almost two months and I thought she might have an ear infection. She said she’d take a look in her ears after she measured her head. She looked around for a tape measure, couldn’t find one, left and came back. Then she wrapped it around June’s head. It looked like a crown or a garland, I told myself, not like the bearer of bad news. June’s blue eyes peeked out from underneath, alert and curious about the proceedings.

“Forty four centimeters,” Dr. Ariza said. She flipped back through June’s chart. “It was forty three last time.” She seemed pleased. Then she got out the growth chart to plot the number. “How old is she?” she asked.

“Eleven months in three days,” I answered.

Dr. Ariza made a little dot on the chart. “Twenty-fifth percentile for eleven months,” she announced. Even better news. At nine months, she’d been between the fifth and tenth percentile. I asked if wanted to get her weight and length to put it in context, but she said it wasn’t necessary, that the growth and the jump in percentiles was good enough. “She’s never going to have a big head,” Dr. Ariza predicted, and she cautioned that she still wants to monitor her head growth, but for now everything seems fine. She checked June’s lungs and ears and found both clear. Then she flashed a flashlight into her mouth and found two new teeth, her third and fourth, the top front ones, just poking through. I could just barely see a sliver of white on each gum in the beam of light. “That’s probably what’s been bothering her,” she said and recommended Tylenol for the pain. Meanwhile, she ran through the symptoms of intracranial pressure, just in case, and soon we were on our way home. June was in the front pack, where she’s been feeling heavy recently, but walking to the Metro, she felt lighter than she had on the trip out.

After a couple hours at home, we headed over to Noah’s school to pick him up from his after-school science class. I trudged through the slush on the path through woods, his boots swinging in one hand, June strapped to my chest, and observed the water level in the creek. It looked higher than usual but not too high. The snow was melting slowly, a good thing since it meant the basement was probably in no danger of flooding.

We waited in the lobby for the five, six and seven-year-old scientists to emerge. Noah always straggles out toward the back the pack and today was no different. I noticed he was only wearing one sneaker.

He flashed me a smile when he saw me. “We made glue!” he announced. I let him chatter on excitedly for a few minutes without mentioning his shoe. He showed me a construction paper spider with one leg and seven white dots where other legs had been. Apparently, the Hands-On Science program is not going to be a threat to Elmer’s any time soon.

Finally, I said. “Noah, you’re only wearing one shoe.”

He looked down and laughed. “I have one shoe and the spider has one leg. If it had eight legs, I’d have eight shoes!”

“Hmm.” I said. “Noah, where do you think your other shoe is?”

He considered the question and answered, “Probably in the science room.” I had him take me back there and sure enough, under one of the low tables was his size 13 blue Converse low top with the orange tongue. He climbed under the table to get it.

“Don’t put it on,” I said. “We’re going to put on your boots.” Back in the lobby I helped him into his boots and we headed home.

Later that evening, after we ate dinner and everyone had cuddled on the couch watching The Electric Company (Noah’s new favorite DVD choice) and after Noah was in bed, I nursed June to sleep on our bed. She slept snuggled up against Beth, who was reading The New Yorker. I lay there watching them, thinking about the exuberance of small children in school doing experiments, neatly shoveled walks and my daughter’s growing head. I wondered what dreams fit in forty-four centimeters.

Snow Day – Postscript

Posted on February 19, 2007 by Steph

It turned out that snow day was just the beginning, a warning shot across the bow. Last week we had an ice storm, which led to an early dismissal and three snow days. June was still sick and not sleeping any better. The less said about the week the better, though by the end I wasn’t keeping track or caring how much time Noah spent on the computer. Playing outside was a bit of a challenge due to the slippery ice. Noah fell and cut his chin just walking around the yard and I knocked down a section of our backyard fence in a sledding mishap. Beth took Noah to work one day to get him out of the house. We baked a lot. Noah and I made molasses cookies, triple fudge brownies, carrot cake, and chocolate-peppermint chocolate chip cookies over the course of a week. Over the weekend, Noah and Beth made pancakes and biscuits. We haven’t been able to get the car out of our ice-rink of a driveway for a week so we’ve been making daily trips for groceries on the bus for the past few days. Today is President’s Day and school is supposed to start back up tomorrow, but I’m not believing it until I see Noah get on that bus.

Snow Day

Posted on February 7, 2007 by Steph

June’s first nursing of the day was at 12:30 a.m. After she was asleep again, I went to the bathroom and looked out the window. Snow was falling heavily in the light of the streetlight. By the next nursing, at 2:30 a.m., it had stopped. It wasn’t much, just about an inch, and at 3:30 and 4:30, no more seemed to have fallen. There’s been plenty of time to clear it away, I thought. Maybe there won’t be a snow day. Just before 6:00 a.m., June woke me for the last time and after she nursed, I considered getting up and turning on the radio to check for school closings, but Beth beat me to it. She came back into the bedroom and reported, “Snow day.”

I groaned. “Where I come from” (she comes from West Virginia) “we’d call this a dusting,” she said. “It wouldn’t close school.” She started get dressed to shovel the walk. She had her gallbladder out nine days ago. I really shouldn’t have let her do it by herself, but I was wrecked from my night with June and didn’t have the energy to argue with her about it. Noah was up before she made it out the door, so she got him into his snow pants and coat and took him with her. He, too, likes to shovel, and even more, to sprinkle salt on the sidewalk. As he slept through it the only other time shoveling and salting has been called for this winter, he was delighted.

Beth usually gets Noah ready for school and takes him to the bus stop before getting on her own bus, but today this was unnecessary, so she left earlier than usual, around 8:00 a.m. It would be ten and a half hours before she returned. The last time it snowed, about two weeks ago, was a teacher in-service day at Noah’s school. Surrounding counties closed schools, but Montgomery schools didn’t need to because they were already closed. We had a lovely, almost charmed day. Noah was well behaved; June in good spirits. Her naps were well timed. I got to spend some rare one-on-one time with Noah. We watched Sesame St. together, a bit of a nostalgic treat, since he mostly watches television aimed at older kids now. Later the three of us had a blast sledding in the yard, Noah cruising down the icy slope on his orange plastic sled, me towing June around the yard in her little pink one. I made lasagna for dinner and a chocolate cake from scratch, with Noah’s help. I thought, why is it I dread snow days so much? This would have been a fine one. All I forgot to do to was make him hot chocolate. I believe providing hot chocolate after sledding to be one of the solemn duties of motherhood.

Lying in bed and snuggling with June while Beth and Noah cleared the walk, I strove to recapture the spirit of that day. I tried to will myself into a good attitude. We’d have fun. I’d remember the hot chocolate. I got up.

“What should I do?” Noah’s whining started moments after Beth walked out the door, free as a bird. Okay, that’s not fair. She was probably in pain from overdoing it with the shovel and headed for a long, stressful day at a job she doesn’t love. Still, I felt a stab of jealousy, which I suppressed. Good attitude! Fun! Hot chocolate!

“Go do your halfa-halfa,” I said. (Translation: play computer games. When Noah first started playing computer games he was limited to two fifteen-minute sessions a day, a limit we quickly abandoned when June was born. Still, remembering those half-of-a half-an-hour playtimes, he calls it halfa-halfa.) June was playing on the living room floor and I was down there with her reading the newspaper and occasionally looking up to comment on her play or hand her a new toy. It was a little too early for her first nap of the morning and I wanted her to sleep while Noah played on the computer, so I could lie down with her and get some rest. Given that, I probably should have waited to let him on the computer until we were ready to nap, but the chance to read the paper with interruptions from only one child was too tempting, so I sent him packing off to the study. Two hours later, when I came in with a freshly napped, changed and dressed baby, he was still there.

It was baby story hour at the library in a half hour. I recently resolved to do more free or cheap organized activities with June (i.e. take her somewhere other than the playground and Starbucks), admittedly more for my own sanity than her enrichment. This story hour doesn’t happen very often so I really wanted to go, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to drag Noah along to an event aimed at babies. I also wasn’t sure it was even happening, given our region’s tendency to panic at the sight of a few snowflakes. I decided to call the library. No one answered. It was only a few minutes after the library was supposed to open so maybe no one was answering the phones yet, but we needed to leave right away if we were going, and Noah was still in pajamas, so I decided to forget it.

“Halfa-halfa’s up,” I said. “Let’s go play in the yard.” We got Noah back into his snow pants, coat, hat and mittens, and June and I similarly bundled and ventured into the back yard. Noah dragged the sled up the slope and crept slowly down it. The snow was dry and powdery, useless for snowballs or snowmen, and just barely serviceable for sledding. He went down the hill a few more times, then bored of it. We took turns dragging June around the yard. She was tranquil, but not as enamored with it as the last time.

“Can we go inside?” Noah asked. I checked my watch. We’d been outside fifteen minutes. It had taken longer than that to get dressed.

“Let’s go for a walk,” I suggested, unwilling to let our outside time for the day consist of fifteen minutes of dispirited sledding. Talking him into this was a chore, but eventually we settled on a walk to the 7-Eleven with the promise of a treat. When we got home, I made the hot chocolate, and we watched a video. Afterwards we had lunch.

The afternoon dragged on. Noah whined, June got crankier and crankier, pulling at her ears occasionally, other times chewing on her fingers. Was it an ear infection or teething? She slept long enough for Noah and I to read a little and build a marble run out of duplos, but he spent a lot of time watching television, playing computer games and listening to a cd of fairy stories while I tried to calm his increasingly hysterical sister. His total media time for the day was a shocking five hours, forty minutes. We don’t always manage to keep it to our goal of two hours a day, but this was a new high (or low). I ditched my planned dinner menu of homemade asparagus soup and instead heated up vegetarian chicken patties and made some spaghetti and a salad. After dinner, Beth and I discussed whether I should take June to the walk-in hours at the pediatrician the next morning to see if she had an ear infection. We decided to see how she slept and decide in the morning.

Then right before bedtime, we had a bittersweet moment. As I tried to coax June into eating a little, Noah sang and danced around the dining room behind the high chair. She stood up in the chair and swiveled around to watch him, her face shining with adoration. This is how she looks at him as a matter of course, but I realized she had barely smiled all day.

I went to bed soon after Noah did, leaving Beth to work at the computer. June did not nurse to sleep as expected, so I turned out the light, pulled her small body close to mine and hoped for sleep. I am thinking spring.