Monday, January 10, 2011

Chit Chat

It is yet another beautiful snowy morning here and I am in a chatty mood.  The lovely drifting snow is actually making me chuckle a bit today because the Dallas/Fort Worth area (where I grew up and where we lived most recently) got some snow over the past day or so and this had the result that my entire Facebook feed was made up of declarations of "IT'S SNOWING OMG!" and the like.  Some people posted pictures that showed that their blades of grass were almost submerged in snow.  HAHAHAHAHAHAHA-- poor Texans...

I think this is the week that Robert and I finally take advantage of all this beautiful snow here and go skiing.  We bought some locals-only passes to one of the ski resorts here before the season started but we haven't actually gone yet, due to the holidays and busy-ness and a lack of appropriate outfits.  I think we have finally collected all the various articles of clothing that you need and I am working on lining up a babysitter for the day and scheduling a lesson for us and then! We shall ski!  I have never ever skiied in my entire life before so this may be quite embarrassing but I am 99% sure that I am going to really like it.  I also want to try out snowshoeing, which also sounds awesome and fun.

This week is also the week that Grace starts ballet lessons.  We did gymnastics through the fall, which was fun and low-key and great for a 4-year-old.  She says she wants to do gymnastics and then ballet and then soccer, so now we have moved on to ballet.  I don't think I can handle driving her to more than one activity a week at this point.  I know she would like it, but the money and the time and the hassle...  Blech.  I am a bit apprehensive about soccer because don't they have practices and games every week?  Nooooooooo...  Anyway, this spring she is doing ballet once a week up at the Jewish Community Center where she is going to preschool, in a little class that meets right after she is done with preschool.  It's very convenient; the teachers will change her clothes and move her to the dance studio and everything.  I ordered her ballet shoes a little while ago and she is in looooooooove with them.  She wears them around the house pretty much all the time as if they were her house slippers.

Dealing with the girls' sleep habits lately has been a puzzle inside a riddle wrapped in an enigma.  For months and months, we have been putting them both down at the same time (around 7:30pm) after giving them a bath together and reading and prayers and so forth.  This was, as you might guess, AWESOME because we had practically the whole evening to ourselves after they went to bed.  Grace hasn't napped for several years at this point, but Violet is still taking a substantial afternoon nap, without which she is unable to make it to dinner awake and with her crap together.  Well, in the past month, Violet has started needing less sleep, I guess, because she no longer can fall asleep before 9pm or so.  I keep experimenting with her nap to see if an earlier or shorter nap will leave her able to fall asleep at the same time as Grace, but to no avail.  Farewell, free evenings...  And although it seems strange, I actually wonder if Grace needs to go to bed even earlier because it can be rough to get her up in the mornings for school and on weekends she will sleep until 8am often.  I somehow keep expecting Violet to go to sleep at the "normal" time but she never does and I need to adjust my expectations, I guess.  I am now looking forward to her dropping her nap so she can go to sleep earlier in the evening and Rob and I can return to our wild and crazy 2.5-hours-of-no-children lifestyle.

Do you think it is possible for weather to affect the mineral content of water?  Since we've moved to Salt Lake City, we've noticed sort of hard-ish water, but since winter settled in, it has gotten WAY way worse.  The poor dishwasher now does less actual washing of dishes and more coating them in a scum of white deposits.  Maybe the colder temperatures make whatever softening chemicals they treat our water with less effective or something?  It seems plausible, I suppose.  Anyway, I used lemon Kool-Aid to clear out the dishwasher (isn't that a cool idea?) and then I bought some of this stuff to use with every load.  I think the dishwasher situation is back under control, and for that I am thankful.

6 comments:

emily* said...

The lemon Kool-aid sounds genius! I am trying that as soon as I feel the energy to go out in the cold and go to the grocery store!

angie.a said...

LOL at the randomness of the last paragraph! :P

My Lu still wants to sleep til 8 and is most definitely NOT a morning person, no matter what time she goes to bed (9:30 is her bedtime, extended 30 minutes from last year!) In fact, I'm pretty sure she'd still nap in the afternoon if they'd let her (she's 13. ha.)

Eva said...

Oh, I envy you so much with the skiing. I wanted to do the same during my German years, and it never happened. Good luck!.

Munich has freakishly hard water, so we always had to put huge amounts of salt into the dishwasher. Do they do that in the US as well?. I am amazed that the kool-aid works.

I am amazed that there are no childrensleepologists all over the place, they would be rich if they could figure out their sleep patters, and vene better, solutions for parents.

Renee Davis Meyer said...

Getting caught up... I had the same reaction to our TX friends excitement/freak out over 1/2in of snow. So cute :).

And I also have cut out sugar and most white flour based things (still eating tortillas, we actually have a grocery store here that makes them & they're decent), and fell like a GIANT cliche here at the beginning of the year!

Sharon said...

Sounds like skiing went well. :-)
Jon is a big skier, as is his whole family, but I'd much rather go snowshoeing. I did downhill until I left for graduate school, and then realized I didn't actually like the adrenalin rush. But I want Anna to ski, so we shall all head to the mountains in February for a few days. Heaven knows there ain't no snow in the flat lands.
How did you go about finding a babysitter for a whole day?

Julia said...

Our babysitter for the day was a girl in her early 20s from our church. She's babysat for us here and there since we moved (and she is FABULOUS), and we worked our skiing day around her work schedule. We didn't ski ALL day, because of scheduling issues, just until 1pm.