How to Succeed in Parenting Without Really Trying: Snow Day

I love a snow day as much as the next person. But when you're on your fifth or so snow day of the year, with a one year old, snow day takes on a whole new meaning. Don't get me wrong, I love the extra days with Evelyn. What I don't love is being stuck in the house with her. She really likes to be on the move and it's always better when we can get out somewhere, anywhere.

I seriously look forward to the day when she is a little older and we can do stuff like I did when I was a kid and had snow days. I am imagining making bread (my mom is a genius with that one...between the mixing, rising, kneading, rising, rolling, baking, eating - it's an all day project!), snowmen, hot chocolate with dipping toast, it's going to be legend-waitforit... Going to be waiting on this one for a while, because when your kid is just one, snow days take on a whole different tone. And when your snow day starts the way that ours did, it's a whole different, different tone.

Imagine if you will being awoken at 2 am, but not by your child. This time it's the banging noise coming from the heat pump outside. The thing is rattling and shaking like it's about to explode and I was convinced we were facing some cold days ahead. I woke up Steve and we checked it out, only to discover that it was covered with about an inch of ice. He proceeded to bundle up and headed out to start breaking off the ice. I "googled it" and discovered the best way to go about this was to turn off the heat and pour hot water over the ice. For the next 45 minutes I handed pots of hot water to him out the window. Thank God when we finished and turned the heat back on the shaking and rattling had stopped. Unfortunately though we were both too on edge worrying that it was going to happen again or that it was something other than the ice causing the noise that neither of us could fall back asleep.

The lack of sleep helped us both to notice immediately that the power went off just before 5 am. At this point I was praying for a two hour delay so I could try to doze a little. Thank goodness for cell phones because I was able to check the school website to learn about my delay. At that moment I started planning what hat I was going to wear to school because without a shower, it was going to be a necessity, and I really still wanted to get to work (the number of snow days is starting to make me really nervous about a vacation we have planned!).

Evelyn woke up and was not very happy with her cold milk, but dealt with her cold oatmeal. We got through a few hours, and were absolutely delighted when the power came back on around 9:00. We took that opportunity to clean off the new ice that was forming on the heat pump. About 10 minutes after we finished, and before we managed to make any coffee, the power was back out. Out of sheer desperation, we piled into the car to go to Wawa for coffee and something hot for lunch. And let me tell you, 20 minutes playing with Evelyn in the car while Steve dealt with the crowd in Wawa was almost like a trip to the playground.

It was back to the cold house after that. And when you're stuck in the house for the second time in a week, there's only so many new toys you can create...