Mulling it over

"For since the foundation of the world God's invisible qualities--His eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." (Rom. 1:20)

I wish you could have heard the message that our friend Tim spoke this morning. I love sermons that have weeks and weeks worth of mulling over packed into them.

The mulling has begun.

The Snowy Day

There is nothing like getting up in the dim morning light to see a snow covered world with more falling magically in front of the streetlight. No school!

To think I almost said "No" to going out this morning! It seemed like so much work bundling up. What was I thinking? The city hum was dulled by the heavy coating, and we made the most awesome snowman. It was just like the cartoons, when characters just start rolling a snowball around and it grows exponentially. It was JUST LIKE THAT! The hardest part was hoisting giant snowball #2 onto giant snowball #1.

We love Ezra Jack Keats' The Snowy Day. and a most delightful video (originally a book) called "The Snowman" by Raymond Briggs. It's a 26 minute wordless story of an English boy who builds a snowman that comes to life that night and takes him on a magical adventure. The music is hauntingly beautiful and we watched the video until the tape broke. Sigh. If anyone ever sees it at a thrift store, I'll pay for it! My mom found our first one at a yard sale, I think. (Kudos to Mom for her amazing finds!)

The girls loved filling their hats with snow, then re-discovered the playhouse and slide, which have stood quietly at the back corner of our yard without visitors for the past few months.

Our snowman has likely not fared well in light of the rain later in the day and now more snow falling. He'd better not come alive tonight and come into the house, because there are enough messes around here to clean up after being house-bound. (Said just like a mother, wasn't it? Where's my sense of adventure and magic?? Ok. Snowman, come alive tonight. You'd be an interesting blog post, at least!)

First Snow

Last Thursday it snowed. Not a lot, but enough to postpone my school's winter program (an adapted production of "Annie") to January and allow me an evening with the girls in the midst of a string of busy nights away from them.

The parking lot across from our house has the perfect, gradual downhill grade for this time in our lives, and we made use of it. As we played, Esther and her friend, Dennis, decided to pop over, and they ramped up our sliding adventure. (You'll see from the video that it's a good thing Dennis showed up to keep the blue saucer going downhill. Poor Evelyn.)

Afterward, we headed inside for hot chocolate. It was my kind of night--spontaneous, fun, outdoors!

The Last of the Snow

This has all melted by now, but a week and a half ago I took the girls up to RVR to have their first bike rides of the season. They did pretty well, although Amelia kept needing to be pushed up inclines and Evelyn's one training wheel kept slipping out of place and she fell about four times. Tough kid--she still wants to ride her bike.

Don't even ask about the school thing. I have had a lot of conversations with God about it, usually shedding tears when I think about the WONDERFUL open houses I attended at both City Neighbors Charter Schools--only to have her 25th on the waiting list at one and 58th on the waiting list on the other. There weren't even 20 spots open in these kindergartens and hundreds of applicants.

She's 60th on the waiting list at the Green School. She actually got into the Spanish Immersion Kindergarten, and even though we LOVE the idea of her doing all her schooling K-8 in Spanish, we visited the school twice and there were so many red flags--quite discouraging. I kept thinking it would get better, but we just can't bring ourselves to send her there. I'm too tired to type out all the reasons.

The ONE good thing about the last visit to the Spanish Immersion school, though, was that I met a woman who told me about another charter school that will be brand new in the fall. It's not as close as any of these others, but still not too bad, and because it is brand new it doesn't have as many applicants. I went right home and looked it up and called, got an application and ran it over. It sounded like the Kindergarten was full but the waiting list was short...haven't heard for sure yet. That particular school's focus is health, and the kids will get 75 minutes of movement, PE, or dance every day, and will study nutrition as part of their curriculum. That certainly sounds good so far. There's an open house for that one on Tuesday, so you'll know where we'll be. (I'll miss another night of AWANA...between my sick kids and these open houses, I've been a really bad AWANA leader this year!)

Then there's Calvary Lutheran School. What a sweet, tender place. I'll have to upload a few pictures from the Grandparents' Day last week. All four grandparents came, and the girls felt really special. The Grandparents felt special, too, and I heard it was a great time. My father-in-law took lots of pictures, and I'll have to upload some of them.

Through all of this I've been really challenged to trust God. Not since having two miscarriages and wondering if we'd ever have kids at all have I had these knotted-up feeling in my gut that make me wonder what God's got in mind and why it's NOT the same thing that I've got in MY mind. It's been pretty humbling to realize that for most of my life God has done a lot of what I've expected or asked Him to do, and I've not learned to really trust Him when the future is truly uncertain. I know it's only Kindergarten, but it's my child--it's going to be a HUGE part of her world next year, and a huge part of her daily influence. Whew.

What's happening to all the snow?

Snow Storm Phase II

That's the view of our back yard during the second storm from the third story window. There's something very exciting to me about these sorts of "acts of nature." I love being snowed in, I love being challenged, I love the adventure of it all.

Alan loves the adventure, too--and he faced it when he climbed out the second story front windows of our house to shovel the heavy snow off our porch roof. (We have enough home improvement to do without the front porch roof collapsing.) The wind was blowing up to 40 mph gusts, and when the girls & I were watching him out the window, Evelyn clasped her hands and prayed, "Dear God, please don't let Daddy blow off the roof!" Our prayers were answered!

Since it's started snowing again...

...I should show you what it looked like as of yesterday. That's Alan shoveling out from our driveway to the end of the street (since we've still not seen a plow!), and kudos to him--he did it! Evelyn is walking down the middle of one of our cross streets, and there is another picture of the view from that cross street down the un-shoveled portion of our street.

Evelyn walked to the grocery store with me this morning & she was adorable--crawling all over piles of snow and laughing uproariously when she fell over. She made snow angels on the unshoveled portions of sidewalks and made friends in every aisle of the store. She even carried a bag home.

Oh--and the snowplow! It's the only one I've seen yet, and it's the one the owners of the corner gas station miraculously used to clear their lot. There are no passenger side windows and the door is held shut with a bungee cord. And I won't even try to describe the sounds it made doing that plowing!

The Current State of Things

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In the midst of all my catching up, I wanted to upload pictures from TODAY. It is still snowing, and there are 26.5 inches out there. There are flocks of robins flying around in our front yard trees, and twice before noon we watched a hawk catch and devour one. City life--so much violence! :)

Alan got a huge kick out of forcing his way into that drift in the back yard. It's great fun, and it's about the quietest it gets in Baltimore.

Would you believe all these pictures were taken before noon? That's how dark these snow clouds are. (Well, except for the one of the main street a block from our house. Alan took that near sunset & added it here later. That street is usually packed with traffic--it looks like a ghost town!)