NEWS NOTES: Blizzard 2011: Day Two

Blizzard 2011 Day One extended into Day Two much longer than D and I had hoped. Late last night we noticed our furnace was not keeping up with the demands of the cold weather. The furnace vent on the outside of our house is situated in such a way that any significant amount of wind disrupts the ....I honestly can't remember the technical terms for what happens. (D could tell you more) I'll just say that the furnace works for a bit, then doesn't work. D does a few things to fix it, then it works for a little while, then it doesn't. This results in a cold house. D was really good about keeping up with the situation the best he could through the night, but the temperature in the house was still dropping. N's room is the coolest room in the house and the whipping winds were making it very chilly. I decided we could move the boys to our room and we could all stay in the same room. I put the pack-n-play up for L to sleep in. I pulled the twin mattress out of the guest room, covered it in layers of blankets for N. I rounded up four or five blankets for our bed. After fighting with the furnace for a few hours, D and I decided it would be best to move the (already sleeping) boys to our room. N had no problem sleeping in our room. In fact, he loved it. He's been begging us to "camp out," so we called this camping out and he thought it was pretty neat. L, on the other hand, was not keen on sleeping anywhere but his own bed....I don't know any other person in our house who likes to sleep in his own bed. Wink, wink. So after struggling with L for a while, we decided L's room was warm enough and he ended up sleeping in there (with two layers of jammies on) the rest of the night...or the rest of what was left of the night.

Even though the boys had an interrupted night of sleep, they still got up at there usually time this morning. Ugh! Why don't preschoolers and toddler sleep in? I'm just sayin. I had some activities lined up for us to do to pass the day along, so we ate breakfast and got right into activity numero uno, stained glass hearts. N made one and I made one. The prep and clean up ended up taking longer than the act of actually making the craft, but we still enjoyed it. N has his proudly displayed on his wall in his room and mine is hung on our sliding glass door. While I sat with N to do this little art project it became clear to me that being up so much in the night was catching up to me already, so I took a nap. I couldn't talk N into taking a nap, although he really could have used one.

After nap it was time to make lunch and get on to project number two. Making homeade pizza dough (Thank you, Pioneer Woman). At this point L was napping, so N and I got some quality time together just the two us. N did a really, really good job of helping me. He followed instructions, didn't sample any of the dough and helped me with some of the clean up. D had a 2:00 teleconference meeting, so I decided I'd get in a good work out before that. While D teleconferenced the boys and I played Play-doh. And, honestly, it looked like a Play-doh bomb went off in our house! The nook and the kitchen were a complete disaster. But, the boys were occupied for about 45 minutes. I got to work on a little project while they played and we listened to pandora, so it was a nice time.

N went outside to play with the neighbors after doing a good job of cleaning up the Play-doh, so I started on supper. (Oh, and talked on the phone with my mom while doing the dishes. Could ya tell I was doing the dishes, mom? Ha!) When N came inside he helped me assemble our yummy chicken ranch pizza. And again, he was a good helper! N did not end up liking the pizza, but D and I really liked it.

The night ended with the boys (all three) playing in the basement while I cleaned up the kitchen. N talked Daddy into letting him "camp" in our room again tonight. We'll see how that goes. After I get done blogging I need to make a game plan for tomorrow....Snow day #3. Yep, no school again tomorrow. At this point, we wouldn't be able to make it to school anyway because our road is still in bad shape.

A snow plow attempted to plow our road and got stuck. He had to call another plow to pull him out. A little while ago there was a backhoe and a snowplow shoveling the road behind our house. I suspect they will have to use the back hoe to clear the road in front of our house as well. The snow in the road is about two feet deep and it's very, very dense. D was outside a couple of times today and he said the snow is so dense you can walk on top of it in places and not puncture it with your shoe. We have a drift in front of our house that I am estimating to be four feet high, but we also have patches in our yard where you can see the grass poking through. So, it's not a blanket of snow. The wind really whipped and swirled it all around our house. Here are some pictures below.

Stained glass tissue hearts