Sometimes (all times?) I’m grateful that I don’t have a huge following. This is one of these times, because I’m about to say something veeeeeery controversial. I’m in the extreme minority with this statement. In fact, I might be the only person to say this ever: I like when school gets canceled for snow. Even (hides behind my couch) extended cancellations.
Hear me out.
These winter days just sort of pass. Wake up, school, sports, laundry, dishes, bedtime, let’s do it all over again. It all sort of melds into one big day UNTIL a little novelty shakes it up. Something like a little snow and ice that never melts so school is canceled for a week and a half.
The kids WILL go back to school again, we can be sure of that. They’ll get their SOL prep done and our Amazon packages will resume their regularly scheduled march to our doorsteps. But watching Mom CRAWL across a sheet of ice to get the sledding hill with all of our neighborhood friends???? That’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
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(Also. If we all go inside for two weeks in January doesn’t that at least SHORTEN flu season??? I’m no virologist but MAYBE I AM.)
I know this is annoying to a lot of people for a lot of reasons. Kids need school and their normal routines, and parents need the same. But if you set those VERY IMPORTANT reasons aside, let’s party.
The setting: We had an apocalyptic forecast that mostly didn’t end up panning out. After being told to prepare for WIDESPREAD power outages we didn’t lose power, and we only got about 5 of the predicted 28 inches of snow topped with a few inches of sleet and below freezing temperatures. If you’d keeping track of the math, that equals INSANITY. Ponds were frozen, streets had several inches of ice, and absolutely nothing melted. In the south, we don’t know how to act in this weather. The mail didn’t run, there was no trash pickup, school was definitely canceled, and I kept saying “this is so weird!!!”
We celebrated not losing power with pancakes and bacon, Deutsch babies and sausage, hot chocolate on repeat and stovetop popcorn. We learned VERY quickly that this snow was terrible for snowmen but absolutely perfect for sledding. (So good that the kids were skim-boarding on the ice in our very flat front yard.) We stayed up late, slept in, had screen time all the time, David binged Stranger Things and we all started a season of Traitors. I ran our dishwasher at least three times a day, neighborhood friends were in and out and there was almost always a sleepover somewhere. It was busy, I “crashed out” (as the kids say) about how trashed our house had gotten once a day. The police only got called on our kids once (true story — a neighbor saw them walking on the pond and worried for them) and I count that as a win.
Mary said it kind of felt like winter camp — this unexpected, freezing cold break in our normal routine. Leave it to her to articulate exactly the feel of things.
When the school announced that winter camp was over (there were two more days of two-hour delays before a proper full day) we marked the occasion by going to Mexican with friends. We cheersed this crazy winter with tortilla chips and talked about how maybe time the forecast looks like this we spend less time storm prepping and more time looking into flights to Costa Rica.
