Now This is a Snow Day

Friday afternoon we started getting e-mails/txt saying that dance classes and other things were being cancelled preemptively "because of snow." We have had notices like that before and always the snow fails to appear. But we went online to see what all the hub-bub was about and weather.com did say that chance of precipitation was %100.

We woke up in the morning, going about our busy before I remembered to look for snow and lo and behold we already had about 3 inches of it on the ground and it continued to snow all day. It was awesome.

We are woefully unprepared for snow weather though...notice us in our thin fleeces and one-size fits all stretchy gloves. It was doubly bad because the snow kept falling into our shoes making it twice as cold. Luckily we had a large supply of hot chocolate on hand.

It wasn't a good packing snow, so no snow men, but we did throw the snow around a bit in a semblance of snowball shape.

Oh no, we may loose Gillian...

Yup, she is out of there.

I bailed ship with her but the other three had fun for a bit longer.

MUSC Interview

The kids and I accompanied Tim on his interview in South Carolina in early January and spent the weekend with Tim's sister Sara and her family. We watched movies, Sara and I experimented with braids, and we had her oldest son Luke's birthday party.

Gillian didn't start growing hair until she was three, not something I loved at the time. Looking back however, three is the perfect age for a girl's hair to start growing. They are old enough to bribe with a TV show or at the very least to appreciate not having their hair in their face. Eleanor and her hair are a constant challenge to me. It has always been so long and in her face and yet she is just too young and too busy to get much done with it.

These braids lasted all of one hour.

Oops...More Christmas

After Christmas we spent a couple day in NC visiting with Melanie and Chauncey and Tim's parents. The pictures below are from Tim's parent's land in Winston-Salem

I'm afraid I had a hard time leaving my book, a masterpiece of storytelling. By the end of the book, as I looked out into the woods, I was convinced that I could hear the Zombie hoards coming. I would recommend it to anyone just so they can see how "real" Brooks can make such an obviously unreal topic.

Aunt Charity and Uncle Jamey sent the kids books for Christmas. Here you see Grandpa Jim trying to coax James away from his new book.

Hewwo Everybody!

Sometime after the advent of 1st grade, James started talking in baby talk, incessantly. It drives me insane (almost literally even if momentarily) to hear my wonderfully verbal 6 year old revert to a level of baby talk surpassing even his actual baby talking stage.

He and Eleanor are super tight and he is always playing her favorite peek-a-boo game with her, popping his head around corners "Hewwo!" or from under a blanket "Hewwo!" (don't get the wrong idea here, he isn't talking baby talk just to Eleanor who is a baby...it is all the time. I absolutely forbade him to speak it to his teacher, but who knows).

Just this morning however, my less than verbal Eleanor popped up over the side of our bed cooing "hewwo!" in her adorable baby voice again and again. It actually was adorable, not infuriating, coming from her but at the same time very frustrating. It would be one thing if she was saying hewwo because 'l' is a difficult sound but deep down inside, Tim and I both know she is is saying "hewwo" because she honestly thinks that is the word.

I guess I should just be grateful that baby talk is the only bad example James has ever set and her picking it up from him is indicative of the amount of time he spends playing with her. I am going to think of it that way rather than the my baby is picking up baby talk from my 6 year old way and perhaps that will stave off my impending insanity.

Failure

Some of you may have noticed that I didn't quite live up to my one a day goal I set when Tim left for his interviews. Gillian woke with an ear infection Saturday and so I spent the day as a hold-your-crying-4-year-old-mother rather than a rule-enforcing-clean-up-after-kids-mother. I know you guys have seen my occasional posts of the mess that is Eleanor and I can't emphasize enough that she sets into scraps like that 2-3 times a day without constant supervision.

So...the next two days were spent trying get the house back together after my lack of rule enforcing on Saturday and then after Tim got home we spent the next two days painting and really getting the house in order to put on the market (as of 1:00 yesterday!).

But I will try to catch up in these next few days.

Below are some pictures of my adorable entropy monster:

Eleanor gets more baths than any of my children (something I probably shouldn't confess to). But so many of her messes are just more than a wet wash cloth can handle. We need full body immersion.

Math Fest

James won the Virginia Math Fest competition in December (for the 1st graders). We took the whole family and had a great time. I made him wear the adorable little vest/suit we got him for Allison's wedding. I just wanted to get more use of out it and he just looked so cute and professional.

I think the competition's main goal was to make it really fun for the participants so they would participate in extracurricular activities again. So at the end, all the kids lined up and went through an audience high fiving gauntlet. James looked a little bemused at the experience.

A Few Christmas Traditions

Our 7th Annual sleeping under the Christmas Tree Party. In the past, we have just had the party on any convenient night, but I think we have finally settled on an official date (still subject to convenience). By official decree, the Sleeping Under the Christmas Tree party will be held on Dec. 21 in commemoration of the First Day of Winter (that is the first day of winter right?). I figure we already have an annual First Day of Summer party every year and so this just fit in nicely.

We never have family dinner at our house since our "dining room" is so inconvenient and barely fits our table and our kitchen is way too small for a table. Tim and I mostly eat on the couch and the kids have their own little table. But this year for Christmas Eve, I had us all squish in at the table and had everything all nice and everyone was dressed up and the house was all clean and everyone was so nice about accommodating me in the clean house and nice dinner and it was really all quite perfect.

Pictures of everyone at dinner in no particular order.

Every year I try to hang up Christmas lights in the kids bedroom and every year have a super difficult time with them falling down all the time. So last year I bought a small plastic Christmas tree at the after Christmas sale and gave the kids their own tree. They loved it.

This is them with their tree in their new Christmas PJs Christmas Eve.

(I have no idea why this is underlined)

Little Chinese Sweat Shop

For almost a year now, James has been asking to learn how to sew. So for Christmas, I finally got my act together and he made Eleanor and Gigi doll quilts. He insisted on including a batting in between the two pieces of material and so I was able to practice my machine quilting when he was done sewing everything together making the situation a win-win.

Can you tell it is really hard for me not to reach in and take control?

Dancer Gillian

Tim is away for a week for his last two interviews and I have vowed that I will post once a day while he is gone and catch people up on our lives. The kids in particular are getting so much older. Perhaps they just look older to me. I am not going to bother putting them in chronological order, but rather will just post whatever looks like the most fun to write about as I get there.

So Gillian started dance for the first time last week. She is so graceful and fluid that I thought it might be a good match for her and it was. She loved it. As soon as she saw me when I picked her up, she raced for me shouting, "I was so good!"

We had to figure out how to get her hair up in a bun so her hair would be off her neck. I am not that great with buns. If anyone has suggestions on other up-do's for dance, let me know.

Eleanor's First Plane Ride

The kids and I flew to Utah for my sister Allison's wedding and Thanksgiving. I was incredibly nervous and just packing the gear around alone was stressful, but it all turned out all right. The kids were all fantastic. It was an evening flight and so Eleanor just lay on my all night and didn't make too much of a fuss as long as I was holding her...which for a flight, isn't a bad thing. She did throw up on landing for the first leg of the flight, but luckily she had a onesie on underneath her super cute outfit and so even that wasn't so bad.

Eleanor during our layover.

Seriously?!?

She got tired of painting the butter (bummle and brown yogurt butter...delicious!) on herself and had moved on to the furniture when I walked in on her.

When Eleanor hears me say her name in the "you're in big trouble now!" voice, she just shuts her eyes and gets this blank face. I just imagine her repeating her mantra to herself, "I'm all alone, no one is going to bother me."

She also makes this face when strangers talk to her. She alternates just closing the eyes like this and hiding her eyes with the back of her hands.

It is really quite charming.

Tropical Storm Ida

We got caught up in the remnants of Ida at the end of last week. At first it was just good clean fun...a full day of heavy rain that is just cozy and beautiful to listen to. But early the next morning that sound of the wind woke me up and it was the first time I thought that perhaps this was not a normal storm. I got up to check the internet to see if I could figure out what was happening and checked on our back TV room which was flooded. I pulled up the carpet and mat and just let the water take the floor (which is cement, so no harm there).

Then the power went out.

That was a lot less fun. In Virginia, everything is run by electricity including our heat and stove. I figured there was no way someone was going to come out and fix it until the storm was done and started to stress a bit about what we were going to eat once the food in the refrigerator went bad and the temperature dropped in the house. But we got lucky, by the time the house got super cold (which to us was just 50 degrees, no laughing you Utahns or Minnesotians...cold can be relative. When I was in Tonga the students wore windbreakers and jackets all the time) the power came back on and then the storm went back to being good clean fun again.

These pictures were taken after the rain let up a bit. It has actually been unseasonably warm since the storm.