Thanks to Laura at Heavenly Homemakers for hosting this. Go over to her site to be encouraged by others.
This morning we woke up to see it snowing. We do not see alot of snow here so it was very exciting for the kids. I grew up on the Canadian prairies and it does not hurt my feelings to not have snow ever again!!! It was also a chilly 20 degrees and when it gets that cold our poor little heat pump has to work very hard to keep the house at 70. I keep it at 70 because my kids refuse to keep all their clothes on, none of them will wear socks or slippers for very long and I think only one of them has pants on right now. sigh... I have to pick my battles and remaining fully dressed is not one of them!
Anyways, back to this morning. To prevent the heat pump from continually trying to heat the house (and blowing money out the cracks in the windows and doors) we have been keeping a fire burning all day. But we have used up all the wood we had piled up near the house. If I wanted a fire today I needed to make a few short trips to the woodpile by the shed. Seeing as the kids were already excited about the snow I figured they could go outside too. I don't have really warm winter clothes for them because it doesn't get that cold here, so I knew it would only be for a few minutes anyways.
My next thought was how am I ever going to find 3 jackets, 3 pairs of mitts, 3 hats, 3 pairs of boots, and 3 pairs of snowpants. You see, I have not been choosing some of my battles wisely. I have mistakenly allowed my kids to play with these items as if they were toys. Oh what a mistake and definately a lesson learned!! Here was my scavenger hunt results:
3 jackets - these are generally pretty good at staying in the porch, I found them all on the coat rack!! Hoorray!!
3 pairs of snowpants - these also tend to stay in the porch, but only because I stuff them way behind the shoe buckets! Sometimes I am pretty smart!!
3 hats - I found two hats on the coat racks. The third was missing, but soon to be found...
6 mitts - Lucky me, the two hats that I found each had a pair of mitts stuffed in them. I had wisely stuffed hats with matching mitts and they had not yet been discovered as a makeshift toy!! I sent the kids off to find mitts and boots. Ben and Carlee were quickly distracted by something else, but Sam was very helpful and found 1 mitt someplace. Now where could the last mitt be? I was now on a mission! How could I let one little hand get cold when 5 other little hands were going to remain warm. I searched and searched and finally found it with some dolls in the playroom!
Meanwhile in my search for a mitt I found all 6 boots. Sam's - one in the porch, one on the couch. Ben's - one under the rocking chair in the den, one in the kitchen. Carlee's took a little longer to find, they were both in my bedroom - at least she took them off before climbing on my bed LOL!
And so we finally found everything we needed to get dressed up and go outside to haul some wood. I figure that it took 45 minutes or more
to locate all the items and get everybody dressed. I think we were outside long enough to haul 4 armloads of wood from the shed to the house - 10 minutes at the most!!!
So was it worth it? What else could I have done in that hour? It doesn't matter - today I am grateful for
- a warm house
- seeing beautiful Cardinals and BlueJays in our yard (I had never seen these birds until this year!!). The red and blue were so vivid against the white snow!
- the joy of seeing my children catching snowflakes
- learning a valuable organizational lesson. Hats & mitts are off limits in the house!
Here they are right before we went outside
No comments:
Post a Comment