Post V-day

Today was one of those days where we were snowed in and glad to be. We did not have to be anywhere. We had no agenda and it was alright. I normally don't know what to do when given a day like that. I usually panic and head to Target. Today was different.

I made muffins. And not only did I make muffins I tried to tweak the recipe to make it better ie, less sugar and less fat. I am not sure it was a complete success, but an improvement. 3 kids ate 6 muffins so I guess the changes were at least edible.

While the muffins were baking, the kids watched TV and I played around with my camera on the manual setting. This is something that I do not often take the time to do. But on this snowy day I wanted to capture the contrast out my kitchen window of this blooming geranium against the white snow outside.
After eating the muffins I bundled up the kids to go outside to play in the fresh snow. Emma enjoyed burrowing through a snow tunnel that was from the last snow.

Sam and Claire sort of disappeared. I could not see them out the kitchen window. I finally went outside to find them...in the street! Who is watching these children???!! We do have an awesome decline on our driveway. It was just calling their name. There was very light traffic today. It was snowy, icing and a federal holiday. What were they thinking?
If done just right, one could end up in the neighbors yard across the street. That is really cool!
After this little escapade I realized I needed to take them to a real hill. After lunch we had Olivia and Lucy over and we all headed to Shaw Park hill for some real sledding. They had a lot of fun and managed to leave with all appendages intact.

When we got home I had the pleasure of talking to my good friend Kim. She just had her 5th child on Saturday! She is the sort of friend you wish you could talk to all evening, but then you remind yourself that she has 5 kids and she home schools and you should probably get off the phone. She called to tell me the good news of baby boy Truett. I am so excited for her and so proud of her in all sorts of ways. I love that she sort of had a Valentine's day baby.

Speaking of V-day. I enjoyed a lovely dinner party with Scott last night. We cooked and brought the food to a friend's house. They cleaned up. It was perfect. I love to cook and hate to clean! I made crab stuffed shrimp. They turned out pretty well, but had quite a kick to them. Tonight I had several plain shrimp left over so we had V-day repeat kids style! They ate it up! Shrimp is one of their favorite things.
That dog bed I ordered came in today. UPS was working. We got it put together and decided it is a little rough. Sort of like sleeping on a firm mattress. I know B is just a dog. A dog that I don't even love most of the time, but I did just make him give up his nasty, smelly, hairy, soft foam deluxe dog bed for the equivalent of a doggy cot that can be hosed off to clean. I decided I needed to at least give him a towel to cozy up with, but I am going to wean him off of it!
We played 2 rounds of dominoes before bed followed by setting up all the dominoes in a row and knocking them all down. The kids had never done this before that I know of and they seriously thought it was the best thing. I was starting to go into this whole thing about "the domino effect", but then I realized that I did not really need to explain this expression of speech, instead I just laughed to myself. It made me think about how the domino effect plays out in so many areas of life. It can only stop when you run out of dominoes or you space them too far apart that the one does not hit the other. Today was a day in my life when the dominoes were spaced too far apart. We stopped. I liked it.