Last spring Mr. SP helped me cut off a few slips of our ivy plant. We had fun watching the roots grow in a glass of water, and out on our deck on a beautiful in the fall, we planted the slips of ivy into a pot, a pot that had been used for summer flowers now dead. The ivy was placed in a window, and a few days after Christmas I looked over and there was a pink impatient blooming away right next to the ivy. What a fun winter surprise!
It wouldn’t be winter without at least one cold snap, and today seems to be the day! It’s nice and brisk out there, but nothing that a bit of bundling up can’t take care of as long as you don’t have to be out for long and you have a nice warm house to come back to. It’s nice to have a reason to wear lots of layers of outerwear. Every year I love my Wintergreen coat and ridiculous hat more. The coat is perfectly designed to keep out the bitter cold, and my favorite part is how the hood connects to the neck. The hat looks utterly stupid by itself, but it turns out that it is the PERFECT design to go underneath the hood of the coat and keeps your head warmer than you could even imagine.
I really don’t mind winter for the most part. Like a lot of local people, I’m missing the beautiful snow this year. What I don’t like about winter, however, is that our van doors are forever getting iced up and frozen shut. This involves kidlets having to crawl through the front seats with messy boots and me having to jam the resident toddler into his car seat from above the front seat and try to buckle him in. Then the frozen doors beep incessantly when the car is shifted into gear to alert us all that they are not quite closed correctly. The beeping can last more than 30 minutes, until the door thaws. It’s so distracting to me when I’m driving. The whole process makes me grouchy. To make matters worse, our electric sliding door is broken and won’t be fixed because the repair is super expensive. That door was so convenient! But we are surviving fine.
It’s the season of hang nails and eczema. I can never remember to apply lotion faithfully.
Last night all the big kids were away to a church function. It wasn’t quite time to put Mr. Trouble on Feet in his crib yet. I sat down at the piano and he had ideas of playing too and was frustrated that I was playing. I decided to get out my French horn, which sadly hasn’t seen the light of day for a year. Because it isn’t my primary instrument, my horn playing abilities go down the drain fast, so I decided to play some very SIMPLE things in the key of C, which quite frankly sounded really terrible. But I was having a great time, walking around and playing. Mr. Trouble on Feet loved following me around, and then he located a plastic recorder that The Banana had left lying about, and figured out how to blow into it to make a note. He was so incredibly tickled with himself, and spent a good 20 minutes blowing his one note on the recorder while I played the horn. I wish you could have seen his grin. He was seriously pleased with himself.
These days I’m planning music class, and as usual, feeling a bit stressed out that I’m not SuperTeacher and am not able to perfectly plan everything out in an even more amazing way. But things are starting to come together, even though I have a lot of work left to do.
Last week Dr. Peds was cooking in the kitchen. The Banana, wearing a great deal of jewelry and a ballet costume kindly asked him if he would step aside, out of the room, for a few minutes. It turns out he was blocking her view of the reflective oven door, where she was preening herself.
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