Tag Archives: children

Snow Diary

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This is a record of the Roder Family’s experience with the epic storm of January 2016, dubbed “Snowzilla” by the Washington Post. (For the purposes of posterity, this writer will document all trials, difficulties, and opinions associated with the storm, including the fact that I think the name “Snowzilla” is a little lame.)

 

Wednesday, Jan. 20

12:00 PM: In preparation for the storm, I have ventured into the vast wilderness known as “Target” for supplies to sustain my family these next days. Despite reports from my compatriots of jungle-like conditions in neighboring “Giant” and “Safeway,” my chosen supply post is relatively empty of wild life, with only a few yoga pant-clad moms stocking up on milk and toilet paper.

I am chagrined, however, to discover that the Target employees who staff the snack bar have called in sick, and I am forced to do my shopping without my fountain diet coke. A sense of foreboding overcomes me as I consider this ominous presage of what the coming days may bring.

9:00 PM: The region is crippled when 1 inch of snow falls on untreated roads two days in advance of the expected storm. My husband asks if I remembered to buy sausage.

Thursday, Jan. 21

5:30 AM: I wake to my daughter climbing into my bed, claiming to have dreamt that her father turned into a pirate and beckoned her to come to him from the top of the stairs. She is terrified and wants comfort, so she snuggles under my blanket while the pirate stirs next to us, preparing to get up for work. I reach an arm out into the icy bedroom air to check my text messages. A missive from the county alerts me that schools will open two hours late. I pump my fist and exclaim, “Yes!” then turn off my alarm.

7:51 AM: I wake to my iPhone buzzing yet again. This message alerts me that schools will remain closed all day. I celebrate by getting up to nurse the baby.

The children eat breakfast and then rush outside to make snow angels.

 

Friday, Jan. 22

7:00 AM: The kids and I are home all day for a planned day off of school. Yesterday’s snow has melted, so we amuse ourselves with books, toys, and TV. In anticipation of a potential power outage, I make significant progress on reducing the back up on my DVR.

10:00 AM: My husband calls to say that pork roast is on sale for ninety-nine cents a pound, and should he stop by Safeway on his way home to pick some up. That and sausage. “Better you than me,” I reply.

5:00 PM: I am relieved that all of my loved ones are safe in our home as the record snow fall begins. The heavens dump three inches of snow per hour over the Washington region, stranding people in their homes, cars, and work places. Combined with the whipping wind, the snow causes white-out conditions, and visibility is less than
1/4 mile. I make a pizza, and my family watches “Inside Out.”
Somehow, Sophia doesn’t notice
that she is touching Raymond, and possibly becoming infected with his little brother cooties.

 

 

 

Saturday, Jan. 23

9:00 AM: After a night of waking every two hours to nurse the baby, I emerge from my bedroom to face the day. The children are already up and buzzing about, preparing to venture out into the still falling snow. I help them into snow pants, boots, and mittens, after starting the coffee.

9:50 AM: The children are finally bundled and headed out the door. The baby and I watch from the safety of the family room.

 

11:00 AM: My husband heads out to shovel snow. This proves to be a Herculean effort that might have claimed his life (or at least his back) were it not for the help of some neighbors. Ten minutes after he’s finished, our driveway and sidewalks are again covered in waist-deep snow. My four-year-old celebrates by climbing Snow Mountain and base jumping off of it.

1:25 PM: I realize that I forgot to buy onions at the store. I cannot make spaghetti sauce. With sausage. My husband offers to walk to Safeway. I tell him that’s insane. He sinks into a deep depression. But wait! Forsooth, a neighbor has some onions! She sends her teenage son out into the storm, and my husband meets him in the road. Dinner is saved!

4:09 PM: I email my Pastor to ask if there will be Mass this weekend. He responds that he is already at the church and will hold the vigil Mass tonight, and will do his best to return in the morning. I tell him we will try to come. God laughs at me.

Sunday, Jan. 24

8:30 AM: It is obvious that we are not going to Mass today, or anywhere for that matter. The snow continued to fall through 11:30 PM last night, and our street looks like this:

I prepare for another day indoors with the children and curse myself for not going anywhere on Friday morning when I had the chance. I could’ve picked up the pork and sausage. Why didn’t I pick up the pork and sausage?!

10:00 AM: For the fourth day in a row, I make the children help me with chores that they don’t normally do. They impress me with their commitment to maintaining an energetic complaining regimen throughout the entire exercise, despite having expended so much of their complaining energy during the previous three days.

1:00 PM: Two of them go outside to play in the snow again, and I praise all that is Holy.

1:44 PM: A text from the county alerts me that schools will be closed again tomorrow, surprising no one. I pray that I can get out of the house at some point in the next twenty-four hours.

4:00 PM: We are reduced to a family of savages. Fights over use of the Kindle and the television are frequent and intense. Shouts of “Moooooo-ooooom” can be heard echoing through the halls. As I write this, the children are pawing at my office door attempting to get in. I plan a dinner of chicken tenders and hot chocolate, praying that it somehow soothes their tempers.

6:00 PM: The evening is spent watching more television in pajamas before an early bedtime, aided in part by the darkening winter sky. We will await the snow plow and its glistening steel blades, which may come tomorrow and free us from our home. In the meantime, I thank God that I have shelter, warmth, food, power, helpful neighbors, a hard-working and dedicated husband, and four snuggly children to tuck into bed tonight.

 

 

How did you spend Snowzilla 2016?

 

The Time Suck

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swirling clock

I need to be writing. I mean I really need to be writing. My book has been on hold since the day my youngest son was born, and I absolutely, positively, need to get back to it!

Everyone says, “Well, you’ve got a pretty good excuse!” And that’s true. And don’t get me wrong, nothing is more important to me than being a mom right now. It’s just that this whole “Hopefully-I’ll-have-time-to-write-tomorrow” thing is driving me swirly-eyed cuckoo, and my kids are starting to look at me like this:

Concerned baby thought bubble

In an effort to at least get something down on paper, here is a list of things I’ve done this week instead of writing: Continue reading →

I’m Baaaaaack!!

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waldo

Image courtesy weddingbycolor.com

Wow, have I been gone a while! If you’re a regular blog follower, you may have noticed that I seemed to have disappeared for a couple months. Well, there’s a good reason for that. I had a baby! birth photo Two months ago, my family welcomed our newest member, little Gianni. This is me and my little cone head on our big day. I never mentioned that I was pregnant because I figured, Continue reading →

Confessions of an Early Christmas Celebrator

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Hello. My name is Nicole, and I love Christmas.

Whew! That wasn’t so hard. And why should it be? Christmas is FUN for crying out loud. I get ridiculously excited every year when our local radio station starts playing all holiday music all the time. I leave my radio tuned to that station from they day they start until the day they stop. (And it’s always too soon when they stop! Everyone knows it’s still Christmas until the twelfth day!) Continue reading →

Writing Quote Tuesday

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And because my daughters and I are completely enraptured by A Wrinkle in Time at the moment, today’s quote comes from the great Madeleine L’Engle:

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L’Engle

Beautiful!

Under-Celebrated Milestones

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If you’re anything like me, when your kids were little, you pored over all those child development books searching for signs that your baby was “advanced.”

“Did you hear that? She just said, ‘Ba ba ba!’ That’s a consonant sound! She’s making consonant sounds at five months and eighteen days and she’s not supposed to do that until she’s six months! She’s going to be President!” Continue reading →

A Mother’s Weight Loss Plan

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I think we can all agree, motherhood brings with it some enormous changes. We’re learning to care for a tiny, helpless human being. We’re using our breasts to feed a person. We’re looking for nuance and hidden meaning in yawns and cries. And our once-flat stomachs have become bloated piles of wrinkly mush. (Ha ha! Who are we kidding? Our stomachs were never flat. At least not mine. Yours looks stupendous.) Continue reading →

I’m a big, blubbering, scaredy-cat baby…and my kids are getting there.

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Image

With Halloween approaching, I thought it a good time to explore the subject of fear. As in, that immobilizing tightness I get in my chest in response to completely rational, empirically terrifying things, like the porch light coming on.

My oh-so-patient husband (who will be fitted for his shining armor on our next anniversary), valiantly checks all the doors and windows for me whenever something spooks me. (Did you see those headlights outside? I swear someone stopped their car in our driveway. Who would do that at eleven o’clock? And why are they playing music? That sounds like axe murderer music, honey. Don’t you hear that?)

And if he’s out of town, forget me sleeping. I usually don’t go upstairs until at least 1 AM, because, well, upstairs (where I have responsibly tucked my children in for the night) is way scarier than downstairs. And before I finally DO climb into my bed, I check underneath, I check all the closets, the kids’ rooms, and the bathrooms. (Not just behind the shower curtain but under the sink too. You know a psychopath could fit in there if he moved my Comet and Charmin around.)

So yes. I’m a big baby. But let me explain how I got this way. First of all, this is my dad.

Image

You try growing up with that and see if you turn out normal. He doesn’t need to even open his mouth to be menacing. When I was growing up, he liked to torture me and my siblings by scaring the living bejeezus out of us. Example. He used to lie down on the couch and say, “I’m going to take a little nap. Just wake me up if I turn into a monster.” He’d lie there, fake-sleeping for a minute, then suddenly pop up with one eye open and his face contorted into this grotesque expression that could only belong to the living dead.

“Oh, that’s not so scary,” you say. “Quit being a baby and grow up!”

I was starting you off easy. He also had this witch mask that he kept in the attic…most of the time. I don’t remember the exact details of this mask’s appearance. I think it’s mutated in my memory a bit, but here’s the description to the best of my ability. It had green, frizzy, goat-like hair that stuck out from its head in chunks. Wrinkly, sagging skin that I’m pretty sure he melted off a burn victim. A long, big-nostriled nose complete with warts. And the wide, tiny-pupilled eyes normally reserved for serial killers and possessed people.

I didn’t like this mask.

Every once in a while-not often, but only once it had been long enough that I’d almost forgotten the last time and begun to feel safe again-he’d pull out the mask. He wouldn’t just come out and scare me with it like a (partially) normal person. He’d go outside and wait for my attention to get absorbed in something innocent, like a book or a tv show. Then, with the mask on, he’d lightly tap the window. The sound could’ve been nothing. Maybe the wind blowing a tree branch. A small animal, perhaps. If I didn’t notice, he’d tap again. Not louder. Still the same, quiet, innocent sound that could’ve been anything, so that when I turned to see “What is that behind me?”, well, you can guess the reaction.

It isn’t entirely his fault that he’s this way. In the Renzi family (my dad’s side) scaring your children is a beloved pastime. I think it may have started with my grandfather. He would dress up like a ghost and terrify my aunts and uncles (and presumably my dad, though I’ve never heard him admit to this).

One of my aunts has been known to hide under her kids’ beds, waiting as long as it took for them to come in and start getting into their pajamas so she could reach out a hand and grab their ankles. My cousins used to go to bed at night begging, “Mom, please don’t scare us tonight.”

My uncle tells the scariest stories I’ve ever heard at a campfire. At our last family camping trip, he had my daughter Emma shouting, “Bad! Bad! I don’t LIKE that story! Stop! You have to stop!” until I carried her out of earshot and reassured her that no bad bears were going to eat her.

But poor Emma. And Sophia and Raymond. Because their mom is a Renzi too.

I do the same, “Wake me up if I turn into a monster” bit that my dad did to me. Plus so, so much more. When Emma and Sophia were toddlers, they were really scared of the Grinch, particularly the song from the cartoon movie. So I sang it. Often. And in a deep, throaty voice that gets them jumping even if I’m saying “I love you” with it.

I’ve been known to put on a dead-eyed, slack-jawed face and amble toward them, arms immobile at my sides, emitting a low groan like a zombie who would love to feast on their brains. And since they’ve gotten into Star Wars, I’ve used this opportunity to impersonate Darth Vader’s loud breathing as I march purposefully toward them. I even downloaded the Imperial March for background music.

My mom shakes her head. “You’re such a Renzi!”

My husband shakes his head. “I hope it’s cozy in Hell!”

And Emma, Sophia, and Raymond? Well, they don’t know it yet, but they’re taking down ideas for terrifying their own kids someday.