The Bits: February 3rd Through February 9th

The Bits and Pieces for the first week of February!

The week before this it was crick in the neck and vomit, this week it was fevers, snot and coughing.  Sunday night, Adam and I noticed that Luke had his tell-tale fever sign: flame-red cheeks.  Although his fever was low-grade by Monday morning, Luke spent the day home from school, watching PBS, coughing incessantly, burning quickly through a box of Kleenex, and feeling a general sense of crumminess, with his comrade, Tommy, in similar straits beside him.  It's been a kind of germ assault around here!  Go away, germs!

That's our boy!  Zac has worked hard this semester, and it paid off!

On Tuesday, Luke's fever was gone and he headed happily off to school, armed with tissues but feeling pretty good and much less boogery, but Tommy continued his sojourn as a couch soldier, as his fever would burn until midday Thursday and it would take him much longer to clear out the gunk.  Poor little, Tom!  Between snow days and sick days, Tommy missed two weeks of school.

Tuesday, the snow drifted down all day, but by early afternoon the snow began to fall hard and fast, and in a matter of ninety minutes we had gone from 5 inches, that was a sum of what had fallen all day and snow that hadn't yet melted from the last storm, to almost 10 inches.  As we watched it pile up, Tommy and I thought that warm home-baked chocolate chip cookies were just what the brothers would need after their cold, snowy walks home from school.  With hot cocoa of course!

It hasn't snowed like this in at least 3 years!  We don't just LOVE it, we need it!

The books I read with the big boys are generally not too interesting or too long to really captivate the little boys.  With them I have been reading through the Magic Tree House series, which we started just before Halloween.  We own all the books in the series that are in paperback, over 40 of them, as they have been a favorite series for all my boys!  Luke, Tom and I read a couple chapters a day, sometimes a bit more if we are close to being done, sometimes a bit less if they are getting in bed late, and with a break here and there for a different book.  Luke usually reads one or two pages from each chapter to me.  We love our adventures with Jack and Annie!  We are now on book #20: Civil War on Sunday.  Luke wanted to know if they go to the Civil War before or after church. 

After Tuesday's snow dump and a frigid cold front that moved in, dropping the temperatures at night down to -17, it was not surprising that school was canceled on Wednesday.  The boys went to bed Tuesday night knowing they had a delay, and by the time Adam and I climbed in bed, we had been alerted that school was canceled.  The boys did a lot inside, but they braved the cold for some outside play too, which helped keep the cabin-fever bickering down.

They were actually outside long enough to build an awesome snow cave on the driveway in front of our 3rd car garage door.  Ben and Josh really wanted to sleep outside in it, but it was supposed to be back in the negative teens overnight, and I had this crazy, unrealistic fear that someone in a 4WD would drive up over it in the night.  So, no.

Our lovely new (to us) treadmill--only 3-years-old, high quality Bowflex brand, not used much by our neighbors who were its previous owners, would be especially great to have on the snow days so I didn't have to go to the the gym to run--stopped working.  When we called the service center with the error code, Bowflex told us we could buy a replacement part for $500.  FIVE HUNDRED dollars.  That is $50 more than we paid our neighbors for the treadmill, which we thought was a screaming deal since it was originally a $1500 piece of equipment.  Yeah.  We aren't sure what we are going to do about that yet.  For now, we have an expensive and large piece of junk in our basement.  And to think, the ancient, loud, rickety, cheap DO NOT BUY IT treadmill we had for 3 years took me through training for two half-marathons, a full marathon and 5 Ragnars, no problem.  There is definitely a life lesson in this, but we are still too annoyed to think about what it is.

YEP!  Thursday was snow day number two!  It was just too cold.  No snow had melted, it was simply too freezing for anyone to be out and the roads were frozen hard and slick.  The -5 temperature was read on our car thermometer at 9am when we drove to the YMCA so the big boys could swim while I ran.  We packed the day with activities and it was pretty darn fun!  But I think we were all hoping to return to the regular weekday routine on Friday.

The boys spent much of Thursday's snow day building a second snow cave in the backyard, hoping that they could sleep in it since there was no car danger.  But after spending so much of the day outside, by the time night rolled around, they were happy to be inside in their warm and cozy beds.

There are times when we can see forward progress in all the work and love we put into teaching and helping Luke to govern and properly express his feelings, not to mention the effort he puts in too!  Like on Thursday, when Luke spilled the Perler beads all over the floor and I told him he'd have to clean them up.  I could see him start to burn, and then I watched him choose to collect himself, get off his stool, and start the cleaning process.  I went to get him the broom, and was so proud of his level reaction, which I praised him for abundantly, that I told him I'd sweep if he would pick the beads out of the dust and put them back in the bucket.  Tommy excitedly jumped in to help, and by the end of the clean-up, they had built "dump trucks" out of Matchbox cars and Squinkie balls to fill up and then dump the beads into the bucket.  It was awesome.  With Luke we often feel like we take two steps forward and one step back, slowly moving forward, but this felt like a leap ahead.  

Thursday night was the first round of Winter Olympics events, with the first ever Men's Snowboard Slopestyle event...which was very cool!  HOORAY!!!  We LOVE the Olympics!  Not ashamed to be Olympics addicts at all.

I love a good, hard workout.  Especially that 'just finished' feeling.

I think the universe was trying to send me a message during this particular game of Chutes and Ladders with Tommy.  THREE times I landed on that #49 girl who eats too many chocolates and gets sick so she has to slide down to #11!  {sigh}  I do have a mega sweet-tooth.  Which is why I need those good hard workouts pictured above.

I love this picture.  The snapping in of the 1,000th piece of an incredibly difficult puzzle (who knew that your eye could begin distinguishing between intricate differences in greens).  SO. Satisfying.

This is what happens to the brain on a 1,000-piece puzzle.

"Ruby is the best dog in the whole entire world."  Yes.  She is.

Adam, Ben and Zac spent Friday night and all day Saturday camping at the Air Force Academy with several other Scout troops at the annual BSA Freeze-O-Ree.  It had, thankfully, warmed up from our mid-week temperatures, but it was still much chillier than last year, and the 'Freeze-O-Ree' lived up to its name.  Brrrrr!  Other than camping in the snow, cold and wind, they participated in several Boy Scout-y activities, like orienteering, lashing and physical training led by some of the AFA Cadets.  Add all those things together, and of course they had a great time!

Unfortunately, the uncomfortable, restless night of sleeping on the ground in a tent in early February and then spending a day in the chilly wind took a toll on Adam, who must have contracted the cold Luke and Tommy had suffered from earlier in the week.  He spent Sunday in bed, sick and shivery, and then made a very slow recovery through the next week.  He's still shaking the exhaustion and cough.  It's no fun when Dad is sick for any of us!

The boys are just so cute at church!  Although baby and toddler life is wonderful for so many reasons, I love that we are past the pew battle years.  This day I had to sneak a picture because Tommy was so deeply engaged in his Bible Dictionary and Josh was sporting the thick-rimmed (fake, 3D with the lenses popped out) glasses, embracing his hipster side.

This appeared on my Facebook feed Sunday night from a friend that I played softball with who was in Adam's class in high school.  What.  Not possible.