Missed a cute one

No, it's not snowy here now, but I neglected to post this photo then, and it's so cute.

More snow?!?

Why is there all this white stuff on the roads again?  It's a couple of inches of slush, now.  I thought we were done with that?  Yeesh.  They say it will turn to rain overnight.  I hope so.  Any more snow days and all us parents might just go out of our heads.

Trash

The apartment trash bin (trash room?), and the recycling. All of Seattle has this problem.

Sammamish holidays

Well! We made it! It's been a very wet and snowy Christmas - everywhere, I guess, but here it's truly unusual. Thank goodness we already live here, because had we tried to travel cross-country to get here, this surely would have been the year we got stuck. As it was, we drove 30 minutes to and from Kari and Danny's house without incident. They got at least 12 inches of snow in the past week and a half. Seattle got somewhat less, and now it's finally turning to rain; only the side streets and parking lots are slushy. We're all hoping for a slow melt, to minimize the flooding. We have water dripping steadily into our apartment through the unfinished ceiling, from the snow melting on the walkway above... in the scheme of things, not the worst, but still.

Kari loves Christmas and it's always very festive over there, with Christmas eve activities including a family feast, writing letters to Santa, and setting out cookies for him and oatmeal and apples for the reindeer. After the kids go to bed there is a flurry of last-minute wrapping, creating artsy gifts (this year was crowns), and setting up the stockings, which go into these gigantic boxes that the kids play in for the rest of the year. I didn't grow up with a full-fledged kid-oriented Christmas, and I am not really up to speed on all the specifics... the details of the Santa mythology, which kinds of gifts are opened when, I get a little overwhelmed. But we swing with it.

Here are the kids discovering their gigantic boxes.



The opening of the presents is your basic mayhem. One of the traditions is to use the leftover ribbons to decorate the dog.



The resulting toys are of course how the kids spend the rest of the day (that, and gorging on cookies). Here's Jordan with a Lego forklift of Sam's. That's Harry in the background with the crown.



At that point he had been in those pajamas for about five days running -- all those snow days, he just never really got dressed. I did finally got them into the laundry today. That meant peeling off the firefighter badge from the front of them, but he said he was ready to let that go.

Jordan's special gift was this lovely knight, shown here attacking the decorated dog.



All the glamour of the morning, though, was in these swords. They're soft, but glittery and bejeweled, and they look a lot like light sabers, and ... there were only two of them, one for Harry and one for Sam. Ah, Christmas. Sam lent his to Jordan for much of the day.



It brought up a lot of Christmas issues for me, because the swords were from Santa, and Jordan asked very quietly and sadly why Santa didn't bring one for him. I was totally out of my depth... what could I say that would continue to respect the household Christmas traditions? But we managed it somehow. And now that we are out of those swords' seductive glow, it doesn't seem to be a problem. Jordan told me later how he had reconciled himself to the situation. He said he thought of something they say at his school, "like when Will was sharing his Star Wars toys? We said, 'You get what you get and you don't have a fit.' This was like that." I've heard that phrase before and I'm not crazy about it - it seems a little rude. But it worked for Jordan. Maybe it helped him recognize that his trouble with the swords was not unique - that there a lot of situations in which you don't get everything you want, and life goes on.

Hanukkah gets its due at Kari and Danny's house as well. Every night there were five menorahs lit before dinner.



And after dinner, the most high-energy games of dreidel I've ever experienced. Here are the kids chanting "Nun! Nun! Nun!" in an effort to prevent whoever it was from winning.



And last but not least, the highlight of Aaron's holiday was Lenny, the gecko. You probably can't see Lenny in this picture but hopefully you can sense Aaron's fascination. He could not get enough.

Ambivalence

I can't figure out whether to be righteously crabby about all the inconveniences we're suffering at the moment, or jubilantly grateful for the stuff that's going well.  The snow that started on Saturday afternoon kept sifting steadily down for about 24 hours, so that now we have something like 6-8 inches.  Even major roads are packed snow and ice, and plenty of side streets are just not passable.  No neighborhood streets will be plowed anytime soon, if ever... Seattle just doesn't have the equipment for that.  So we can't really drive anywhere - we're stuck with whatever's within walking distance.  On the other hand, everything we need is within a few blocks:  grocery store, pharmacy, nice restaurants and coffee shops, parks with hills for sledding, even a friend's house.  We can even walk to work.  So can I really complain?  Our front door is even draftier than before, since the firefighters kicked it in - Dale stuffed the cracks with actual rags, believe it or not, as if we were genuine paupers living in a shack.  But at least the door is functional, and yesterday he replaced the rags with weatherstripping.  It's still ugly, but it's less ugly now, and it works.  The power is on, the water is on in spite of a pipe freezing, the apartment is warm, the gas fireplace is cozy, the fridge is stocked.  The snow creates some limitations to say the least, but it's actually quite pleasant outside in its way, not windy and not even all that cold.  I enjoyed my walk to work.  (Dale generously made it my turn today.)  We're not among the thousands of people stranded at airports all over the country -- and you know we would have been, had we been attempting to travel cross-country this year.  Instead, our only travel plan is to get over to Sammamish on the 24th.  They're saying it'll be raining by then, so I-5 and I-90 should be all right, and we live three blocks from I-5.  Dale and I are feeling more than a little cooped up, being in the kid zone in a small space for a long time - school was closed all but one day last week, and it's hard to imagine it opening this week.  But the kids don't actually seem to mind, and we're all getting along amazingly well, considering.  And it is the holidays, anyway.  We had a super cute first night of Hanukkah last night, with latkes and presents and singing and an actual game of dreidel after Aaron went to bed.  

Teeny Latkes

3 russet potatoes

1 medium onion

3 eggs

3/4 c flour

1/4 c matzo meal or cracker crumbs

1 Tbsp salt

lots of fresh pepper

Grate the potatoes and onions, preferably with the grating blade of a food processor.  Turn the mixture into a colander (poof! you're a colander!) and squeeze out all the liquid you can squeeze.  Let sit for two minutes and squeeze again.  Mix in eggs, then dry ingredients.  Heat up a nonstick griddle with a few tablespoons of oil until the oil is shimmering.  Drop batter onto griddle in heaping teaspoonfuls, or bite-size forkfuls.  Turn when you see that the edges are golden brown.

Serve with hot applesauce, sour cream (or greek yogurt), and salad or soup.  Makes enough for dinner for two adults and two kids who had no afternoon snack after a long walk in the snow (whoops).

This just in

10:30pm Dale and I were watching a pretty good movie and there was a sudden noise of rushing water. Nothing in our apartment, thank goodness, but probably a frozen pipe burst somewhere nearby, sure to be a drag for someone. And then the shrieking alarm started to go off.

It continued, and was intolerable, and we went into what-do-we-bring mode. 1. Children. 2. Warm things. 3. Laptops. 4. Wallets, keys. Other than that my mind was a blank. We threw laptops and warm things into bags, woke and dressed the children, and carried them down to the car, because it was 25 degrees outside and we didn't know how long we'd be stuck out there. We considered driving to Bekah and Bob's house, but the roads are very bad. The fire trucks were blocking the driveway, anyhow, so we just stayed there in the car. Randomly, one of the things I happened to stuff into my pocket was the camera, so here's the scene in front of the apartment.


The kids were great. Aaron never missed a beat. Jordan was shaky at first, but soon accepted our assurances. Here they are just hanging out in the car.


We hoped it was just the broken pipe setting off an alarm perhaps because there's a sprinkler system, but of course you never know. And they have to check everything. So we waited a while and chatted with Jordan about all the cool firefighter stuff. He is of course very into all that so it's a great topic of conversation.

After not too long, they let us back in and turned off the very loud alarm, and we got back upstairs and put the kids back to bed. The firefighters had kicked the door in, and in fact had blown the frame right out of the doorway.


In case you want to know, that's apparently quite easy to do. "One swift kick," they said. They came in shortly after we had the kids down and had some work to do in our front bathroom; apparently the busted pipe is right behind our front shower wall. More construction ahead, it seems. (We are the lucky ones, though... the guy below us got all our water in his apartment.) Jordan got up to check out the five firefighters in the bathroom and was thrilled to accept gold badge stickers from them; then he said he wanted to go back to sleep. that's my boy!

The firefighters nailed our door frame sorta back together before they left. They were super nice, as firefighters always seem to be.

Cabin fever

No pictures of snow tonight: we're indoors. For entertainment Dale constructed a very fine cave out of the couch, blankets, and the beloved orange futon.

Inside, Dale and Jordan played spaceship while Aaron methodically chewed on a flashlight. It was a good time.

Later we played Freeze Dance. No pictures of that, which is a pity, but we were having way to much fun to bother with the camera.

Bracing ourselves

Cold out there.  We're hunkering down for the storm that is predicted to arrive later this afternoon or evening, supposedly with 3-8 inches of snow in the city.  For Seattle, that's really disabling.  The packed snow and ice from a couple days ago is still on the roads; it's not too bad (we did drive to the grocery store today) but there are scary places.  Don't even look at the picture of the charter bus that slid down a steep icy part of Capitol Hill, busted a guardrail, and almost went onto I-5.  Amazingly, no one was hurt.  They all climbed out the back windows.

The University Farmer's Market was up and running as usual this morning.  The meat vendors didn't need coolers... it was 25 degrees outside.  Jordan thought that was pretty funny.  "It's like we're already inside a refrigerator," he said.  Freezer, actually, but I got his point.  

The good news for the day is that the furlough from Maryland for my salary bracket is only two days.  We can live with that.

Snow

Surprise! It snowed last night, and the resulting inch of powdery stuff stuck all day. I saw it starting and experienced a wave of dread, which evaporated when I remembered where we are! In Maryland, this would be the beginning of who knows how much snow (it was different every year), with rather scary storms, school closures, difficult travel, and frequent power outages. Our record was four and a half consecutive days of no electricity. That was truly rough. In Seattle, as in the rest of the developed world that I have experienced, a long power outage is maybe four hours. No worries.

Today the kids were eager to get out and throw snowballs, so we went over to Greenlake and took a bunch of cute winter photos. Jordan actually agreed to wear his coat. Aaron, once he had mastered his club-foot boots, was dying to jump in the lake and see the ducks up close.




We had fun until we got cold, and then we zipped back home for some holiday cooking. It's a food-gift year and I'm making orangettes, peppermint candy, salted caramels, peppermint bark (with the kids), and if I still have any energy left after that, peppermint patties and candied ginger. I've never made any of these things before, which is half the fun. The orangettes are done - came out great.