Winter

Yes, that's another foot of snow (give or take) logged for Southern Maryland, and we're only at the end of January! It is COLD here and the entire day's snow was of the perfectly dry and fluffy variety. Winds last night made some 2-foot-plus drifts. I'm impressed!

I've been short on blog material lately because my main projects are gifts - completed as of today and about to be sent off. I'll debrief on those in a week or so. But in unloading the snow pictures from the camera I found a couple of other activities worth documenting:

Amy has been requesting "giants" so on Monday I successfully put together a whole giant family and she was quite pleased. Then she knocked them over. Oh, and did I mention the extreme lack of free time resulting from a certain someone trying to convince me that naptime is for babies? I had been reluctantly accepting the change, but as the week went on our sweet cooperative daughter was transformed into the Abominable NO Monster and life got a little ugly. Yesterday we forced a nap on her, and she has been a changed child since. She's napping again today, after only minor protest, and I think we stand convinced that getting her down mid-day is still worth the work, even if it means twirling her around her bedroom to a spirited singing of "Winter Wonderland" to get her to fall asleep. Really.

Oh, and Don and I finally finished a jigsaw puzzle! He bought this for me for our FIRST Christmas (we weren't even engaged yet). We made a half-hearted attempt at it when we were first married, then it languished for a good three years or so. Last summer we rigged up a box to fit the finished puzzle, allowing for transport away from cats and small fingers. This was the breakthrough we needed, and after many evenings of work spanning many months, we finally completed it. The picture reminds us of a real-life place where we used to canoe in our dating days.

So that accounts for some of our time in what has been a fairly calm and relaxing month of January. Happy Winter!