Monday: School closed. Starts to snow at 6 am and doesn't stop until 5pm. I think we got about 9 inches. Heavy, wet snow...easy to shovel, but HEAVY.
Tuesday: Because the snow stopped so late, school is on a 2 hour delay so they can finish plowing. Michael's school day is unaffected, as an afternoon kindergartner.
Wednesday: School closed due to ice storm. Because the trees/electric lines were already weighed down with that heavy snow, adding a layer of ice on them caused many to fall down. Streets closed, lots of people without power. We did NOT lose power, but 60% of our entire county did.
Thursday: School closed due to loss of power at many schools. 4 other school have been opened as shelters for the people without power.
Friday: School closed due to power outages.
-sigh-
I am really really grateful we have had power throughout. And the kids are so much easier than they used to be when cooped up in the house. We are just sad that our spring break is now gone and the school year is likely to extend past our already late end date of June 19th.
We had one of Jeff's co-workers over for dinner on Tuesday night...I'd never met them, but they just moved to our town and were out of power. It just seemed neighborly. Very nice people, and their son is in 1st grade...so he fit in with our crew very nicely.
I had to go get some more boxes of girl scout cookies yesterday. The roads were fine, but it was interesting to find ways around the normal routes, since so many roads were blocked by wires/trees. The kids and I were glad for a diversion.
We have spent a fair amount of time sitting around at home. During the last round of snow days, I implemented the "no screen time during school time" rule. It has worked FABULOUSLY, if I may say so myself. At the time they would be leaving for the bus, all computer games and tv are turned off. They are forced to play games, imaginary and board, read, be creative. I am forced to pay attention to them, read with them, play games, bake, clean the house, work on projects. Come the time the bus would be arriving back at our house, the electronics can come back out again. It was a simple guideline that they never fought me on and it was something I found easy to enforce. Everyone is in better moods (computers make my kids (read: Michael) looney tunes after a while), we did some fun things, la dee da!
But we are ready for school.
Tonight at least will be good. Jeff's company has taken over the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia's science museum. Their employees will have free reign over the museum, free food, and there will be Olympics themed events and a viewing party for the opening ceremonies in one of the big theatres in the museum. It should be really fun. And we are DESPERATE to leave this house...so there's that.
I would show you some pictures...but we got a new computer in December and I don't know where to find them. Mental note: ask the geek squad how it works.
Enjoy your day! We've invited a ton of people over for a playdate just to see other faces :)
2 comments:
We were in the same boat as you--our county was at one point 80% without power and miraculously, we had power for all but about 40 minutes...which was fine! I have no idea why we lucked out but I probably wouldn't even be fit to read your blog post if we had lost it for days like many people have. Crazy ice!
I will be stealing your electronics idea--brilliant! Oh but we aren't going to have any more snow days are we?!?! I bet we will and I'm interested to see what the make-up plan is. We already lost one day of break and added 2 days on to the year. Not sure how they will handle the rest!
The Franklin Institute event sounds awesome- hope you enjoyed it!!!
That no screen time during school time sounds like a good idea. Of course, I think that requires motivation, and I think this winter has sucked all of mine out.
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