A few things from this week.

2 pictures of things my 16-year-old eats, to demonstrate the amount of food this kid takes in, during this growth spurt that he is currently in.  The first picture, above, is a hunk of pork roast with barbecue sauce on it.  I took the picture because I thought he was just going to eat it with a fork and I found that kind of interesting, but he didn't.  He went back to the kitchen, got a package of hamburger buns and made himself 5 sandwiches.  Just a bit of light eating.  Below is his playing cards snack from a couple of weeks ago, during the worst part of the snowstorm, 2 hot dogs with ranch, 2 ham sandwiches on whole wheat (he's not gluten free, obviously) and 3 starburst (clearance valentine's candy) with a sweet tea chaser.  He does also eat healthier things ... he eats both fruit and veggies very well.  The other day I made peas for dinner and took a helping for myself.  He ate the rest, since the other 2 people currently living here do not care for peas at all.  I told him when his big brother moved out that he had been promoting to eating "cleanup" (it's a sports metaphor ... baseball) and he takes it very seriously, helping me prevent waste by eating the leftovers.  He's a growing boy.

Piles of snow in our hometown, 10 days after the snowfall.  It's still here.  

A couple of balloons.  We were gifted with these after the baby shower we went to last week.  They have been slowly losing their helium floatiness all week, but still get involved in daily games of keeping the balloon from touching the floor, which is fun for all ages. 

I've done quite a bit of art journaling and crocheting this week as I have not felt like doing too much else.  :-( 

This week has been okay.  We are easing back into our pre-snow routine, getting out quite often, going to visit mom, seeing friends.  I even did a tiny bit of shopping yesterday, stopping by Family Christian to pick up something I had ordered online.  I think that counts.  Otherwise, the grocery store and the library have been the only places I have been.  We got a really good book from the library the other day, The Slaves of Socorro, another installment in The Brotherband Chronicles and we have been doing that each evening for a read aloud.  It's very funny so far and we have had a lot of LOL moments.  John Flanagan has some good insights into human nature that make us chuckle and a humongous vocabulary, which stretches us and has us looking words up nightly.  (So this counts as school,of course.)  Some of my fondest memories of elementary school were when my teacher in fifth grade would sit and read to us for 15-20 minutes in the afternoon.

School.

We're still homeschooling.  Youngest son is enjoying studying German on Duolingo very much.  He's actually learning to spell at bit in both languages due to the fact that the lessons make him take dictation.  He hears a phrase in one language and has to type it in the other.  He's learned a great deal about indefinite articles, but typing the wrong ones in a few times.  After he masters German, he wants to keep going and learn some other languages.  I do not doubt that he will.  It's so wonderful to have such a resource as this available to us, in our home, for free.  I think I am going to use it to refresh my French studies.  I studied French for 3 years in college.  I first took it as a required language and ended up almost minoring in it.  I had to drop it the last year because I was a transfer student trying to finish in 4 years and there were some things I needed to make up that I had missed.

Okay, just like that, I've already finished my first French lesson on Duolingo.  Very cool.  I also may learn to play the violin if he doesn't mind if I use his.  We'll see though.  I still have a ton of things I need to do with mom's house as soon as the snow melts.  (I'm starting to wonder if it ever will!).

Well, we went out and about yesterday.

Going up and down our driveway was pretty terrifying but it was important to my daughter, so we went.  We went to a baby shower for my daughter's sunday school teacher's daughter.  :-)  Anyway, it was okay.  I didn't feel good as is my norm but I went anyway.  We were able to deliver the baby blanket that my daughter has been working on.  I think it turned out really well.

Still here, now with ice.

Last night we had freezing rain on top of the 15 inches of snow on the ground. Yesterday before it hit, I had to get a prescription filled so I got my courage up and went to town.  This meant driving up and down our snow covered driveway in my little RAV4 which for some reason is scary and more up-close-and-personal to driving it in the Suburban.  As you can see the driveway in the bottom picture beyond the buried Ford Focus, you can see that it is kind of scary, snow and has a lot of trees that someone might hit, but you have to get up speed to make it up.  Now that my daughter has been driving some, she understands more how crazy this is.  My husband and I have been doing it for years and it still feels crazy.  I'm not too good at walking in this amount of snow, (not graceful or coordinated with the best of weather conditions!) so I didn't want to walk all the way up.  In my little RAV4 I made it most of the way, got out and started walking and pretty much immediately fell over.  The snow makes for a soft cushiony landing, but I didn't have on gloves and so I had to put my bare hands in the snow to get up.  After this, my hands hurt for quite a while.   Anyway, we are back in, warm and toasty, with only the one dog in the house, playing cards and watching Netflix.  It will be over soon enough, I'm sure, and spring will come.

Still snowed in!

I'm still kind of enjoying it.  We have been having beautiful views out the windows and playing lots of card games, watching Friends and drinking hot cider and hot chocolate and eating lots and lots of soup.  My husband has had a pretty rough week in some ways, unfortunately, trying to get to work and having to work all night moving packages one night and other days trying to work from home with our not so good internet.  We've got one car at the bottom of the driveway (It's a big hill) and one that won't start and my car that he took to work this morning.  It's been a week to make me appreciate my work at home job, that's for sure.  Ironically, it has been during this week that I got a call to come in for a job interview.  It was supposed to be today, because when the man called me Monday about it, it was seriously snowing and I estimated that I would be able to probably leave the house by Thursday.  I was wrong, although my husband did get out yesterday, briefly.  Hence the one car at the bottom of the driveway.  I called and rescheduled the interview for Monday and I am hopeful that I will be able to get there.  It's a long drive to this job and I hope that they offer me enough money to make it worth my while.  I kind of enjoy driving, so maybe.  It's been a very slow week at my current job.  I guess people aren't being admitted to the hospital due to snow?  Anyway, I had to call in due to lack of work one day and it looks like I may be doing that again today.

Since it got so frigidly cold last night, -11 degrees, our 2 outside dogs and one of the cats spent the night in the house, in my daughter's room.  None of them are up yet, so I don't know how that went. Hopefully, there were no accidents in the room, only much sleeping and enjoying the

warmth.  When the decision was made to bring the animals inside,one of the cats was no where to be found, so hopefully, she found warmth someplace.  :-(  We have a lot of nooks and crannies and places to hide for kitty cats around here.  

Snowcation 2015.

For some reason, we didn't have much work today and so I got off early.  I didn't feel like doing a whole lot, so I did some art journaling and some baking.  

Just look at the beautiful carrot cake ....  nailed it! 

This is a stump in front of our house that is about 18 inches tall.  We have 12 inches of snow.

If you look closely, you can see 3 blue jays in this tree.  This is where they line up to come and eat our cat food.  :-) 

Snowing! 2015

It is really, really, really snowing here.  The weather forecasts say that we may get 15 inches of snow. I think it's fun for many reasons.

• It's beautiful and it's unusual.  We almost never get that kind of a snowfall, usually an inch or less. I'm cooped up in the house with some very nice people.  
• The electricity is still on.  
• I work at home and also, I don't have to work today. (!)
• I know that Mom is being taken care of and I don't have to worry about her being alone in her house.
• I have a new afghan I just started and plenty of art journaling supplies.   
• Though I don't like to get out in it a whole lot, I like to watch the kids have fun.  

This weekend we've done all kinds of wintery weather fun indoor things.  We've watched Frozen and Leap Year, probably 2 of my favorite movies of all time and very appropriate for this time of year.  We've eaten Valentine chocolate and all kinds of crock pot veggie soup and we started playing Shanghai, a game of progressive rummy that I learned in childhood and haven't played for a long, long time.  It's been fun introducing the kids to it.  

Scraphgan 2 is finished and is now on Mom's bed at her assisted living facility.

The kids learned to write in Elvish runes yesterday.

It's so pretty!

Freckie's silly face.

Last night we took some pictures of her with a silly paper crown on her head and somehow, google made a series of photos into an antimated GIF.  How cute it this?