Storm of the Week Club

Note to Mother Nature:  I did not sign up as a member of this club and I am demanding a refund of my dues and a rapid transition to 50º and sunny outside weather!

Here in the North East, we seem to be stuck in a weather pattern that is bringing us some variation of snow, sleet, ice, or freezing rain at least once a week and usually on a Tuesday or Thursday.  Since I teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays, this is mucking up my syllabus (I haven't even gotten to know the names of my students yet!) and making me extremely cranky.  Gone are the days when I used to sit by the window wishing and hoping for a nice snow storm that would get my out of a test I had to take (I'd engage in prayer and bargaining with Mother Nature until about 9:00pm every potentially stormy winter night and then buckle down and study for 2 hours when my prayers did not work).

Instead, I read the scary accuweather blogs and forums obsessively, hoping that they are the bearers of happy tidings that a snow event will narrowly miss the corridor between Philly and Lancaster that is the site of my commute and life. 

Alas, they never do, do they?

Last week's storm brought us this:

Oddly enough, we were not the only ones taking pictures at night from our front door.  Our neighbor across the street was doing the same thing.

That was the amount of snow that we had by about midnight on Wednesday into Thursday.  We got about 2 to 3 inches an hour that evening, so by the morning we had an impressive 15+ inches of snow on the ground (from just this one storm). 

This is what Philly's Washington Square looked like on Thursday:

What's not easy to tell from these photos is that we also had a pretty impressive coating of ice underneath all of that snow.  We had gotten a few inches (perhaps 3, total) of snow on Wednesday morning.  This was then followed up with some heavy sleet and freezing rain.  All of that froze and turned into a sheet of ice that was extremely difficult to remove even when one tried hard to do so.  Not that everyone did, of course.  I wonder what kind of revenue stream the city of Philadelphia would have were the cops to actually issue those $50 tickets they threaten to give out to anyone who fails to clear a 3-foot-wide path in front of their property.    It's also amazing to me how bad the side streets are in our neighborhood (which is just south of the busy Center City district).  Even streets that typically are very heavily trafficked are icy, tire-rutted messes.  Lancaster (which appears to have been spared the freezing rain of last week's storm) is in much better shape than Philly.

Hallie was extremely perturbed by the sound of the ice pellets dinging on the house.  She couldn't make sense of the noise.  It seemed to her that snow was falling from the sky but it sounded nothing like snow at all. I finally convinced her that these were tiny little ice cubes bouncing off of our house.  At bedtime on Wednesday she asked Sharon if she could look out the window one last time to see the ice.  I think she was mightily confused when Sharon told her that it was snowing again, not icing.

While no big fan of the winter weather, Lea is a huge fan of snowmen.  She was thrilled by the Frosty that we built in our backyard right after the Boxing Day snowstorm.  But that Frosty did not last terribly long.  His disappearance saddened Lea, who has mournfully exclaimed each and every day since then (and often more than once):  "Where's Frosty?  Frosty melted!"

She would have enjoyed seeing the one that was built quite quickly in the middle of Washington Square Park on Thursday:

Alas, chief snowman technician (AKA Sharon) had to work on Thursday and Friday so we weren't able to get out and build Son of Frosty until Saturday.   But never fear; Thursday's snowfall was still with us by the weekend.  So on Saturday Sharon got to work.  This time around the snow was perfect for forming snowmen and Son of Frosty came out looking quite grand:

I think the juxtaposition of Frosty and our residual summer gear is hilarious.  I'm hoping that posing a snowman with a beach ball, hula hoop, and sand bucket will somehow act as a harbinger of warm, pleasant weather.  


Meanwhile, we brace for yet another event (this one seems to be destined to start as snow, morph into ice and freezing rain, and maybe end as all rain, which will be followed by a major Arctic cold snap and yet more snow.  Holy Snow Squall Bat Man!

Snowy Day

Philadelphia got about six inches of snow last night into today and, after our experience last winter (which featured snow totals in excess of 60 inches), everyone in the city overreacts to the mere mention of the word 'snow.'  The stores were picked clean (and crazy); residents (including myself) were gearing up for snow by mid-morning on Tuesday (and were disappointed by the fact that no snow had fallen by 6:00pm); the city declared a state of emergency (which was excessive) and had sent out fleets of trucks outfitted with plows and salting supplies to pre-treat the roads and prepare for the storm (which is a good thing); and numerous schools decided to close preemptively.  By morning there was snow on the ground and the Philadelphia School District shut down for the day (but Hallie's school was open; sadly, since she doesn't go in until the afternoon on Wednesday, she did not get to play in the yard with all of her friends who enjoyed the soft powder). 

But never mind that; we made our own fun.  Around about 11:00am, I got the kids bundled into their snow suits and grabbed the plastic sled we purchased last winter and we headed out into the elements.  We ran into our next door neighbor's girls who were hanging out shoveling the last bits of snow from the walk in front of their house and they and their nanny and their nanny's boyfriend (who graciously pulled the sled for them) traipsed down the block to the playground.

Amazingly, no one else was playing there so our girls had it all to themselves.  They made good use of it, too.

Hallie and Karina had a blast being pulled through the snow:

Ariana loved it too, but Lea was less convinced of the charms of being out in the snow.  She wiped out on the sled once (which no doubt brought back memories of eating snow when she was on the sled last winter) and didn't really relish getting the stuff on herself.  (This is also how she feels about sand, which is not terribly surprising).  But she had a few good (fairly slow) pulls through the playground in spite of this.

Hallie and Karina soon discovered the charm of snow sliding.  It was a lot of fun to race down the slide and land in a big fluffy pile of snow at the bottom:

Lea was not so sure that this was quite as much fun as her sister suggested it would be:

Hallie and Karina also made snow angels:

Here's Hallie's perfect angel:

And speaking of perfect, Hallie's vocal cord surgery went swimmingly well on Monday.  She is working on yet another cold (which she did not pick up at CHOP; its origins are probably to be found in the epidemiological swampland of her preschool) so it's hard to tell if she has her full voice right now, but it's definitely easier to hear her.  And interestingly enough, she seems much more interested in speaking, and speaking in longer and more complicated and assertive phrases, than she was before the surgery.  We're not sure if she finds it more comfortable to speak (since she needs to strain less to be heard), or is aware that people can hear her better, or is just more confident, but our nanny and Hallie's teachers both mentioned this to us.  And we can definitely hear her better and don't have to walk up to her and ask her to repeat what she's saying a million times over.  She still does not have a full voice, and there's still a hoarse quality to it, but we are very happy that we did this surgery and, all things being equal, we will likely do a more permanent version of this some time this spring (the bulking should last between a year and two years before the medium gets reabsorbed, in contrast to the 3 months or so that this injection will buy us).  Anyway, I will try to capture Hallie's 'new' voice on tape and upload it at some point when she is over this cold.

Snow Fun!

It snowed here in Philly pretty much non-stop from about 7pm on Friday night until a little after 2pm on Saturday. And this was no wimpy snow, either: while the original forecast suggested that the snow would be on the wet side and with an equivalence of 10 inches of snow per 1 inch of rainfall, they reported last night that, since the temperature here had dropped quite precipitously over the course of the day yesterday, we actually received 15 inches of snow per 1 inch of rainfall. What that amounted to was 28.5 inches reported at the Philly airport.

I have no idea what we received on our block inch wise, but this is what it looked like when we bundled the kids into the toboggan and headed out to the park that is (mercifully) just down the street:

Hallie got the hang of sitting up in the sled as Sharon pulled it, but Lea was a bit perplexed at the whole thing. She ended up turning the toboggan ride into an opportunity to make snow angels:

Hallie thought that her little sister was being hilarious:

Ultimately (like after five minutes), however, it became apparent that Lea was not having a huge amount of fun in the toboggan and, when she ended up with a face full of snow (there were no real tracks carved through the park), I headed in with Lea and Sharon took Hallie for a few races around one of the tiny side streets in our neighborhood. Hallie, sensory-seeking speed demon that she is, kept wanting to go faster and faster and would have had Sharon at it all night.

When Sharon had had enough, they came back here and were playing in the snow a bit. Hallie pulled off her glove (she hates wearing them and the only thing that keeps her current pair united are the mitten clips I got for her). She grabbed some snow and it was so cold that it hurt her hand. And then she fell. So she came back inside in tears, but did have a mostly excellent time outside in the snow. And what's better, I think, at least on some level, is that she talked with Sharon at bedtime about how she was feeling when she fell. She also talked about how Zen (our kitten) made her feel scared when he got too close to her on the bed. All of this feelings talk is really excellent. Probably even better than the snow.