snow day – Life Off Headset

Weekly recap + what we ate: Snow, snow, snow, and show!

This past week was pretty mild, but what a snowy, snowy week we hadthe week previous! I have to say, after having absolutely no snow last year, it was a bit of a shock to have so much snow last week. Of course, still not as much snow as in other parts of the country, but certainly what qualifies for a lot of snow here – maybe 3-5 inches.

The quick version:
-Monday was MLK Day, so no school for the kids. I did have to work, so the Husband was home with them.
-Tuesday: Snow Day!!! Schools were closed, and the building where we rehearsed was on a delay. Also, annoyingly, County summer camp sign ups opened at 6:30a am. So at 8am, I was on the phone with work re-scheduling rehearsal while at the same time on my computer trying to register the six year old for summer camp slots. The Husband worked from home.
-Wednesday: another snow day! Although the 4 year old’s preschool was open. Let me tell you – she loves it when she’s the only one who gets to go to school. Again, the Husband worked from home.
-Thursday: Everyone got to go to school. HOOORAY!!!!
-Friday: Snow day! Again. I had to be in at work around 2pm, so I took the morning shift with the kids and the Husband went in to work. He came home around 12:30pm.

So yup – a grand total of ONE day in school for the older two kids.

In amongst all this – I opened a show and closed a show. I would say I also teched a show, but the process was so quick, I would barely count it as “tech” – just one day of rehearsal onstage. The show was a program of three newly commissioned 20 minute operas. It’s something we do every year and I love participating. There is such excitement about presenting premieres of new works written by young composers and librettist. One piece in particular was so quirky and fun – it takes place in a world after humans are extinct and the characters are microplastics and a tardigrade. I had to google tardigrade and now I feel that much smarter for knowing what a tardigrade is. (If you, like me, didn’t know, it’s a small microscopic creature that can live in extreme conditions and survive anything. They look like little bears. Apparently there’s an Aquanots episode about them.)

So putting up a show combined with a snow week was kind of … a lot. But at least I got to go to work. The Husband’s three day weekend stretched into a five day weekend, and he should get a medal for being home with the kids for all that time.

Things that worked this tech period:
– prioritizing life and work things. I didn’t have an assistant for this show, so I had to really focus on what was important to getting the show up. There was one moment in particular that stood out for me when I declined a meeting invite. It was just a 20-30 minute meeting, and normally I would think, “It’s thirty minutes, I can squeeze that in.” But I decided that, no, actually I’m stage managing a show without an assistant – I need those 20-30 minutes for myself or I won’t get my paperwork done and I will be stressed out – the meeting can wait. It was a bit of a lightbulb for me, to be honest – to be able to say, “That isn’t a good time for me, can we re-schedule?” I have no bones declining meeting when I have to be somewhere else – ie. “I’m only available until 3:30p because I need to pick up the kids.” But somehow, saying, “I can’t do that because I need to finish my paperwork” I don’t know – that had never occurred to me.
– Not worrying about things being pretty. Look, like most stage managers, I love nice paperwork – I love charts and diagrams and running times all lined up. But you know, ultimately getting the information out correctly is the most important thing. So yeah, there was some paperwork that had a mistake and I decided that I’m just going to correct that with a Sharpie rather than try to open the document on my computer and change it. Why waste the paper or my time?
-Packing food, particularly leftovers. I always pack food, but it’s especially helpful because this theatre is farther away from the staff canteen than the other theatre I worked at. I think three out of four days last week, I had leftovers in a tortilla for dinner. Perfect thing to eat efficiently.
-Four Color Frixion Pen. Frixion Pens are one of the best new inventions for stage mangers. Well, at least this stage manager. My favorite is a four colour Frixion pen in black, green, red, and blue. All those colours in one barrel so I can colour code cues in my book without having to pull out another pen. And also the ability to erase cues when things change. Amazing.
-Riding to work with my work bestie. When I’m in tech, my social life suffers and I miss seeing friends. Which is why I love that one of my good friend works with me and we get to ride to work together and talk about life and work and all the things at Trader Joe’s that I miss buying.
– Realizing I’m the stage manager. I have always been more of a self-effacing type of stage manager. It’s not necessarily a good thing. But twice last week, people have said to me, “You get to decide; you’re the stage manager.” Whoa what??? Right. I get to tell people that I want them at a meeting. And, this was the big moment – I get to decide that it’s okay that I wore my snow boots all day because if it’s between taking the time to change into my black shoes and not getting that one last thing done, versus just keeping the damn snow boots on but getting the thing done – I’m going to keep my snow boots on. And the world didn’t end. I mean I don’t think it’s an open invitation to be cavalier and dress unprofessionally, but … in the scheme of things – it’s okay to keep the snow boots on.
-Taking time to go sledding. Last year I bought a sled. Then it didn’t snow. Bummer. So I was very determined to take the kids sledding this year when the snow hit. You know, if it was a choice between taking the kids sledding and making the paperwork pretty – I chose sledding. On Tuesday, I told the kids that if they wanted to go sledding, we had to leave the house by 9:30am and we managed to do it. We drove to the local elementary school where there is a nice hill and went sledding for 45 minutes.
(Funny side note story -while sledding, we ran into a kid that the 12 year old knows from school, and he said snow days at after care were the best – the aftercare company was still providing care that day because the buildings were still open – because you got to play dominos and then after lunch, the after care folks would take all the kids to the hill and give them each a pizza box to go sledding. Doesn’t that just sound like the height of childhood memories?)

So we only have one sled – the other thing is a plastic tub that we use as a water table during the summer. It works great!

Then on Friday, the same thing. I told the kids that if they wanted to go sledding, I would take them, but we had to be ready to go by 9:30am, and again, they were! And honestly, I would have been really disappointed if we hadn’t gone. This time, we also took our neighbor’s kid with us. (I firmly believe in being a village and if I don’t have to be at work until 2pm then why not take an extra kid with us so her parent can have a few hours to work? Plus the kids always love having other kids around and they other family takes our kids sometimes in the evenings too.) I took a few runs down this hill this time in the sled which was really fun, and I thought ahead and brought a Thermos of hot chocolate with us, a lovely treat once we got done sledding.

Looking back on that list, what struck me is that a lot of what made the week go well on my end is that I made very mindful choices about what was important to keeping me going and everything else could be subpar or just dropped. There is a culture in stage management (and theatre, and really, I’m sure a lot of other industries) of pushing yourself and letting work drain every last drop that you have to give. It doesn’t need to be that way. I need to do things in a way that leave me mental margin, so that when the important things come up, I have the bandwidth to deal with that. Even things like taking my kids sledding – being able to step out of the job and concentrate on, “What can I do to make memories with my kids?” – it puts me in a better mood at work because I know that if nothing else, we had 45 minutes of joy that morning. I feel more like there is a bit more balance to me. It relieves a bit of the mental load of wondering if my kids’ are having a good day and the guilt of not being home at bedtime – because you know what? They at least had a good morning and I feel like there’s a bit o (I do still have a lot of guilt and struggle over the fact that the Husband does 95% of the parenting when I’m working and I know it’s a lot to put on his plate… I need to work on how to achieve balance when there is no balance.)

Hopefully writing those “things that worked” will help me remember them next time I’m in tech. Which won’t be until May. That’s a little wild for me to realize that I don’t have a show to work on for a long stretch.

Fun Family Activity – We went to a concert by Elena Moon Park. Park is a musician who reimagines folk songs and children’s songs from around the world, mostly from East Asia – yay Asian representation! I had heard her at an outdoor concert two years ago and I really loved her music so when I had a chance to hear her again, I was really excited to hear her again and take the kids. During the concert, the kids were kind of clingy and they didn’t participate in any of the clapping games or hand gesture-y parts, and I was worried that they weren’t liking it. But afterwards, they were singing bits of the concert, so I guess they did enjoy it after all.

Other nice things this week:
-The six year old reading Dogman to his little sister.

– Dropping the 12 year old and her friend at voice lessons and then going for a walk and re-discovering the Glass Forest. The Glass Forest is a really neat little bit of forest where someone has hung bits of glass and metal and what not from the trees to make a series of sculptures. When you walk through it, the wind knocks the metal and glass together and it’s like walking in a windchime. It’s a little creepy, a little magical. I was on a walk while the 12 year old was at her voice lesson and I happened upon the Glass Forest. I had come here years ago, on some kind of mission to find hidden gems of DC. This definitely fit the bill of “hidden gems” but I had forgotten about it in the years since, so it was a nice surprise to find it again.

-Okay, I feel super pretentious recounting this, but it was such a sweet moment – after sledding on Friday, as we were enjoying our hot chocolate and taking in the snowy views, the six year old says, “Mommy, it looks like a Robert Frost poem!” Lest you think the six year old is some kind of genius budding English scholar – he knows exactly one Robert Frost poem. We have an illustrated version of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” – and the cover did indeed look like the scene before us:

-And this made me laugh – The Husband and I stayed up late to watch the football game one night. And the 12 year old tried to convince us to let her stay up too. The reason? it was not because she was a huge footballs fan. No – it was the Kansas City game and she wanted to see if she could catch a glimpse of Taylor Swift. We sent her to bed, though I did take a picture of the tv when they showed Swift during one moment.

Current woes – Homework. The first grader has started coming home with homework and he is very reluctant to do it. I alternate between threatening/pleading/cajoling/bribing/etc. him to do it, and just saying “F*ck it! It’s first grade. If he doesn’t want to do it, why should I spend energy getting him to do it?” Then I have a tiny panic spiral about how I’m not setting him up for success and I go back to threatening/pleading/cajoling/bribing/etc. This is not where I want to spend my energy. So truth – it usually only gets done 50% of the time.

I’ve grown very hands off with the 12 year old’s homework. This is not some bold parenting choice. This is just lack of energy. At any rate, she has told me that many of her teachers don’t believe in homework (Great! They should meet the 1st grader’s teacher!). So it is entirely possible that she doesn’t have any homework. I for sure only very rarely see her do homework, and her grades keep coming back solidly average, so I guess she is doing what she is supposed to be doing, whether or not it is homework. As someone whose parents were very involved in my academic progress, I’m feeling a little bit like I ought to care a little bit more.

Grateful For:
-The Husband having the flexibility to handle all the snow days.

-All the super talented people I work with. I know I say this every time, but I work with amazingly competent and supportive people. Everyone knew that I was working without an assistant and there were so many offers of, “What can I do for you?” I guess this is another thing that made last week good – when people offered to help, I let them. I let someone else check the sign in sheets, I let someone else buy me a Coke to get through one long day. I let someone else start rehearsal when I couldn’t make it quite in time after dropping the 4 year old at school following a delayed opening. There is no room to be a martyr here and I’m glad I don’t have to be.

-How beautiful everything looks blanketed in snow. I know living in snowy weather is not always easy or ideal, but it sure is pretty, and I always feel lucky that I get to see it. There is nothing like being cozy inside with a cup of hot tea (or cocoa) while watching the world being buried in snow and silence.

-And also -grateful for snow plows and snow shovels so I can get safely to work. And an all wheel drive vehicle.

-The twelve year old’s friends for coming to celebrate her birthday. We had six kids over to belatedly celebrate the twelve year old’s birthday, with three of them spending the night. The next morning we had waffles and bacon and fruit and then a group of them went to see the new Mean Girls movie. It was a pretty hands off affair for us. We helped them make pizzas, then gave them the run of the basement. I did go downstairs and turn off the tv at 12:30am to a bit of minor protesting. Afterwards, the twelve year old said to me, “Thanks for turning the tv off. I’m really tired and I would be even more tired if you had let me stay up all night.” Wow. That’s a nice bit of self awareness there. Anyhow, I’m glad that her friends came over and that she had a good birthday party.

Looking Forward To:
-I signed up for a slot at Career Day at the 12 year old’s school. I went back and forth on whether or not to sign up – I think I have a pretty fun job, but it’s also a very seasonal job (for me – there are people who do this full time), and I don’t know if non-full time employment is really what Career Day is about? Oh well. I’m nervous – what am I going to talk about for thirty minutes??? But it’s good to do new things, particularly things that scare you a little bit.

-Lighter work load and time to focus on house things. The two big projects are to figure out what to do about my car and moving forward with getting window treatments for the living room. Both projects carry a lot of mental and emotional stress. There’s also little projects like cleaning out the pantry and linen closet. And I really want to label the spice jars on our spice rack. Who knows if I will get that all done, but good to have aspirations.

-Listening to more of this audiobook – narrated by Julia Whelan. Julia Whelan is an amazing audiobook narrator. This book itself has some questionable plot holes and devices that normally would not appeal to me, but Whelan does such a great job that I’ve been sucked in. I can’t tell whether I would like this book if I read it vs. listened to the audiobook.

What We Ate:
Saturday: Parmesan Mint Pasta. The Husband cooked because I was at work. The kids had requested mac and cheese (from the box), and the Husband said this looked more interesting and made it instead. Surprisingly tasty even though it was cold when I ate it after getting home from work.

Sunday: Scavenge. Sundays we usually try to eat down the fridge. I think there was frozen tortellini with red sauce for the kids. Not for dinner, but at lunch I had salt and vinegar stir fried potatoes, to which I added julienned golden beets. A friend had given me a bag of beets from her produce box because she didn’t like beets, so I was looking for ways to eat them. I actually ate some of them raw too – the beauty of golden beets is that they don’t stain your hands deep purple-red.

Monday: Funny story. Before I left for work, I told the Husband that there was tofu in the fridge and he should use it up. Later that day, he texted me asking if the tofu was in a red lidded container. I said, no the tofu is shrink wrapped, still in it’s own packaging.
<I put that in the dinner. > he replied. <It melted.>
Then, I realized what was in that red container.
<That was feta> I texted him.
<Lol!> he writes back. <It is still feta. L said hmmmm that’s smooth, dad!>
So I guess for Monday, they had kung pao feta for dinner. With noodles.

Tuesday: Tofu stir fry. For reals this time.

Wednesday: I made vegan gnocchi soup, a recipe that I’ve made many times because the family loves it. I actually made all of it before I went to work, except the gnocchi and coconut milk – the Husband added that before he served it.

Thursday: I’m not sure what the family had for dinner. I had a ktichen sink sandwich – pickles, hard boiled eggs, cucumbers, avocados, mustard. It was quite messy to eat and now that I think of it – I could have just mashed all that into egg salad and it would have been less messy.

Friday: I had leftover curry eaten in a tortilla wrap at work. The family had waffles.

Saturday: Pizza, make your own as this was the sleepover night. And there was lots of soda and chips involved. But also carrots, cucumbers, and apple slices.

Sunday: Again – scavenge for dinner. The kids had hard boiled eggs and half and avocado each. I’m sure there were other veggies and fruits in there too. I had kimchi friend rice and golden beets pan fried on the griddle. I feel like this is my go to Sunday scavenge dinner – kimchi fried rice and whatever other veggies are in the fridge.

Weekly recap + what we ate: Snow! finally!

Snow and clouds and blue sky in between.

We finally had snow! After the mildest of winters, snow arrived. Enough snow and ice that the first two days back from winter break were declared snow days by the school district. The third day was a delayed opening, and it ended up being quite a mess; so many school bus drivers were out due to COVID that ninety bus routes were cancelled that day. Given that COVID numbers were going up, we decided that just to be cautious I would drive the nine year old to and from school instead of having her take the bus. I’m not sure if it really is going to make a difference, but isn’t this whole pandemic layer after layer of risk mitigation and risk assessment? So we figured if the bus was a layer of COVID risk, we could remove that since I could drive her. Hopefully by the time I go back to work in February, the COVID numbers will have gone down.

I’ve been reading Katherine May’s Wintering, and she has a passage about snow days that I love:
“I love the inconvenience [of snow] the same way that I sneakingly love a bad cold: the irresistible disruption to mundane life, forcing you to stop for a while and step outside your normal habits.”

In a way, the snow day seemed like merely an extension of our COVID isolation period – a time outside of the everyday rush and bustle where we were forced to just be in the place we were. The Husband went to work – since his test was negative and he was vaxed and boosted and had no symptoms, he was allowed back to work after five days – leaving me home with all three kids. We couldn’t venture very far afield, and instead found our lives wrapped in a cozy cocoon of winter weather. Even our planned grocery delivery had been cancelled. So we ate down the pantry and the freezer, and the shin deep snow in the backyard was our playground.

Bundling the kids is always a process. It takes me about fifteen to twenty minutes to get the four year old and the baby fully into their snow gear and out the door. (The nine year old gets herself dressed, save for me zipping her up since we have these gloves with extended cuffs that have to be put on before the coat.) Mittens, snow suits, hats, scarves, wool socks, boots, Aquaphor to protect their cheeks … it’s a lot. But at least I know they are warm enough to they will stay out there for a good long while. I do need to put a calendar reminder for next fall to review the snow gear since I think the two older kids will need new snow pants next year, and definitely boots. Luckily there will be hand me downs for the baby.

The second snow day, the nine year old wanted to take a walk down to the trail to see what the snow looked like there. Everything was blanketed white and shimmery ice. The kids played a little too close for my comfort at the edge of the creek, my warning that wet feet would be cold feet going unheeded. It was a beautiful walk, though. The trail was quite empty and the stillness made our crunching footsteps seem louder than normal. I love the squeaky brittle sound of walking in snow.

There was a nice lazy rhythm to these snow days… up and outside by 9:30a. Play in the snow until lunchtime. Then lunch with hot chocolate – I had bought a large pack of hot cocoa bombs from Costco before Christmas. I don’t think I ever got the milk hot enough to melt the chocolate shell and release the hot cocoa mix in a swirling explosion like on the YouTube videos. The bombs kind of just floated in milk and then slowly disintegrated to reveal cocoa powder and marshmallows. Oh well, nothing is ever like on YouTube.

Then indolent afternoons of screentime (nine year old), books (four year old) and naps (baby) while I tried to pick up the kitchen. I was once again reminded how much living happens when people are home all day. The clean up felt constant. It was definitely an unrelenting couple of days.

Wednesday, I took the four year old and the baby sledding while the nine year old was in school. (The current guidelines allow her back in school if she is vaccinated and without symptoms, so I guess she didn’t really have to quarantine.) I love sledding even though we don’t own a sled. I had, in fact, put a calendar reminder for myself to buy a sled last fall. But fall came with it’s sixty degree weather and the need for a sled didn’t seem imminent. Never mind that the point of writing myself a calendar reminder was so that I didn’t wait until the need was indeed imminent. I felt a little sad earlier in the week as I watched other kids whizz down hills in their sleds, and kicked myself for not having bought a sled. Then I went looking around the house for other things to use. I ended up grabbing a cardboard box (what else?) that I wrapped in a garbage bag, and the cement mixing tray that we had been using as a water table. This latter worked surprisingly well, though the cardboard and garbage bag did manage to get the baby down the hill, even if not as slickly. It was really adorable because the four year old insisted on keeping one hand on his sister’s “sled” as they went down the hill in tandem. Once in a while they fell over, going heels over head, but they got up and did it again, pushing and pulling their make-shift sled up the hill.

Thursday, was the first day that both kids were back for a full school day. I took the baby to Seneca Creek State Park in hopes of having a little hike, but she just wanted to play on the playground. I did manage to convince her to walk down to the edge of the lake and we threw branches in the water, a favorite pastime. It was definitely cold – probably mid 30s – but there is something I really love about cold weather and bare trees and the quiet of winter.

Friday we had more snow, and another snow day with classes cancelled. I took the kids sledding again. This time, I also brought along a baby bath tub since the cardboard and garbage bag from last time had disintegrated. The baby bathtub didn’t work great, which was just as well since the baby wanted to go to the playground instead. So, after telling the nine year old to keep an eye on her brother, I took the baby to the playground. She wanted to swing, though before I knew it, she had fallen asleep in the swing!

We ended up meeting up with some friends at the hill, which always make things more fun for the nine year old. And then at one point, I looked up and a snowball fight had broken out among all the neighborhood kids who were at the hill, complete with sled barricades. Of course my first instinct was to tell the nine year old that she shouldn’t be throwing snowballs at other kids, but I bit my tongue and let the classic kids rumble play out.

So in the final tally, the first week back at school was actually one short day and one full day. The four year old was technically released from isolating on Thursday, so he had one day of school before the snow day since the day care follows the public school closures.

On the one hand, three snow days in one week is a lot, but on the other hand, I was kind of glad that I had a bit of relief from the anxiety of sending my kids back to the COVID germ pool that is school.

Fun food discovery:
I’ve started making a Dutch Baby for breakfast on those days when the kids want pancakes but I have no patience for all the assembling and mixing and making. The Dutch baby batter comes together quickly in the blender and then cooks up super fast, all in one skillet. Bring the skillet to the table and everyone have at it. So much quicker than pancakes.

What We Ate:

Monday: Green bean and tofu stir fry.

Tuesday: Black Bean tacos. Basically a can of black beans, warmed up with half cup salsa. Eaten on tortillas.

Wednesday: Lentil Quinoa bowls with Roasted Broccoli.

Thursday: Cod cakes (from Dinner Illustrated) with roast asparagus and potatoes.

Friday: pizza (the husband made) and The Muppet Movie. It was the baby’s turn to choose so we each picked a movie from our DVD collection, lined them up in a row and let her pick one. I have to admit, while I find The Muppet Movie hilarious, I have yet to stay awake for the whole thing. Funny story – the Husband used to watch this movie with the nine year old, and everytime the movie got to that bit in the middle where the projector “broke”, he would turn it off and say, “Oh no! I guess that’s the end of the movie.” It took her a while to figure out that there was a whole other rest of the movie that she hadn’t seen yet.

Weekly Recap + what we ate – still winter

The weekend arrived… plink plink plink. The sound of freezing rain. It covered everything in a sheen of warped glass. The Husband, from the Midwest, is a big believer of scraping ice when you can, not when you have to. (Actually this is his philosophy for many things). So every couple of hours he went and scraped off the cars. Towards the evening I put my earphones on, bundled up and took a turn at ice scraping. It turns out to be a rather soothing and invigorating task. Moreso when I only did it once the whole day. The slow, persistence of ice scraping and the puffer coat cocoon that encased me allowed me to acheive a sense of flow.

Of course I would probably feel differently if I were in a public parking lot at eleven pm after a long rehearsal. It does somewhat inspire me to scrape the ice off my car during a dinner break to make that 11am experience not so prolonged. That whole future self thanking past self thing….

Monday was President’s Day. Originally I had wanted to go hiking, but snow and ice made that not a great idea. So we had a cozy day at home, doing I don’t know what. The husband and 4 year old planted scallion bulbs. We played Parcheesi. We did manage a walk mid afternoon.

We had a lovely respite from the freezing weather with two days of sunshine and weather in the mid 30s – 40s. I took full advantage of this and took the kids to the playground. I’ve realized that three weeks of quarantine and then weeks of unending snow, freezing rain, and general wet weather has made me a little less precious about letting the kids play on a wet muddy playground. The mud will wash and things will dry. Of course things will probably irreparably dirty, but… oh well.

The two days of sunshine were followed by more snow. Enough to have a snow day in the city, though our school district continued to have virtual schooling. I miss the idea of a snow day. The things that bothers me somewhat is that the school district closed the Equity Hubs and the schools that were hosting care programs. Understandable given the weather, but then why not declare it a snow day for everyone? It is not much of an equity hub if the students who rely on it are pushed further behind. This school year has been so hard on everyone. There is a glimmer of hope in that in person schooling is set to begin again next month but even that is

I had my first art assignment. We were to make an abstract drawing by enlarging something, zooming in on the detail.. I chose a frozen raindrop on a branch, though it didn’t turn out to be as abstract as I wanted. Also – the drawing is on 24″ x 18″ paper, and during our critique session in class, I felt like it’s hard to really understand a picture without knowing the original size. I’m growing to love the fuzzy, forgiving nature of working in charcoal. Having a project to work on feels really great right now.

Fun food for Valentine’s Day. My mother makes beautiful food creations. She taught me how to make radish roses and bunny rabbit carrots. And one Thanksgiving she made this amazing fruit turkey. In that spirit, I made the kids special Valentine’s Day ramen.

Indoor art activity. I find letting the kids do art projects very stressful… the mess!! But they have fun and it’s a good way to pass the time indoors.

This week in the 4 year old’s preschool cirriculum we are talking about the five senses. Later in the week, his older sister was reading Little Red Riding Hood for class (What big eyes you have! What big ears you have! etc.), and the 4 year old says, “Mommy… The wolf is using his four senses!”

What We Ate:

Sunday: Dumplings (the frozen ones from our favorite dumpling place) and braised bok choy. While not as good as getting them from the restaurant, they were much better than any other frozen dumplings you can get at the supermarket.

Sunday: 1 Hour Vegetable Pot Pie from Minimalist Baker – vegan recipe, but I did use regular milk and butter. I love this recipe because it really does take an hour to make, and always tastes like you slaved for hours making it.

Monday: Vegetable Curry with Lemon Peanut Rice from Fresh India. I might have to buy that cookbook – everything I’ve made from it has been really good. Also I managed to find fresh curry leaves – often one of those “optional” ingredients – and I was excited to use them. They made things taste… I don’t know.. fresher? Hard to describe, but I could definitely tell the difference.

Tuesday: Mushroom Ragout with noodles from Mark Bittman’s Dinner for Everyone. This recipe is in the Mapo section – it’s Bittman’s vegan take on Mapo Tofu. The four year old loves mushrooms and devoured this.

Wednesday: Roasted perch and catfish and roasted veggies. For Ash Wednesday.

Thursday: Vegetable Barley Soup from America’s Test Kitchen’s Vegan for Everyone. I didn’t have turnips, so I subbed radish and it was really tasty. Good food for a cold snowy day.

Friday: Takeout pizza and Brigadoon. Despite being disappointed that so many of my favorite songs were cut (Come to me, My Mother’s Wedding Day, From this Day On… actually I love all the songs in this score), I still really enjoyed this movie. There’s Gene Kelly for one – so elegant and poised. And also – plaid leggings on the men! It was LuLa Roe worthy.

Weekly recap + what we ate – SNOW!!!!

Saturday we went to the park for the first time in weeks. The four year old took his new scooter and the nine year old rode her bike. At the park the kids climbed and ran and swung and hopped. We worked on teaching the four year old how to pump his legs on the swing. There was sun and 40 degree weather (which feels warm these days), and fresh air and a change of scenery and neighborhood dogs playing catch in the tennis courts.

It proved a good thing because it snowed the next day. Beautiful white snow! A thick blanket of it, covering everything.

The snow gave us several days of fun, despite the fact that distance learning has done away with the idea of a “snow day”. I’m a little bit in mourning about that, though one of the teachers had a virtual snow day that consisted of the students throwing wadded up balls of paper at their screen. IRL (as the kids say these days) we bundled up and went outside and built snow forts, shaped snowmen, made snow angels. The kids even helped the grown ups shovel. The four year old found a “snowchair”- a divot in the snow bank left next to our drive way by snow plows. The baby discovered the joy of eating snow… she would find chunks of snow and carry them around in her hand, chomping it like a snow cone. The nine year old delighted in throwing snow balls.

As for me- I loved the quiet and the cold. After the kids went inside, I would just stand outside, letting the cold envelop me, the snow muffling the sounds of outside and day. It was like being in an isolation chamber. And I could breathe and for two minutes not be responsible for anything except my own breath.

Afterwards, there is a quiet satisfaction to seeing all our snowy boots lined up next to the door and our snow suits hung in a row to dry in the bathroom.

The listservs exploded with snow gear for sale and free, a lot of it posted as “like new” and “barely worn”. I guess a lot of people had stocked up in snow gear last year. And then it hadn’t snowed.

I’ve been doing some more cardboard building. When we got our new stove in December, we acquired a new appliance sized box for projects. Also- when the stove was delivered, I asked if they had other boxes and they left a refrigerator box as well. Around the end of the year our cardboard box UPS truck finally collapsed and went out for recycling. For weeks the four year old has been requesting a FedEx Truck while the nine year old wanted an ice cream truck. And because he wanted to give me a challenge, the four year old requested a door in the back that went up and down. Well. I guess I was going to get serious about carboard box building so I did some internet research to find better ways of attaching cardboard together and found these screws designed for cardboard box building. Between those, packing tape and brass fasteners, I feel like I have a decent variety of tools for cardboard box construction, and my cardboard box construction game has been upped.

The back door on the truck is manually operated, but it does go up and down! It took a bit of making and testing and trouble shooting, but a fun challenge.

Also on another day, I made the four year old and airplane as well. There are many modes of transportation inside our house.

Despite the snow, the hyacinths have started to poke their green heads up. Perhaps the warmer weather has confused them. It is so deceptive to see them push their way through the ground so soon. I hope they survive.

Hearts found in nature:

We did some kitchen reorganizing and, taking stock of what I was using and not using these days, I packed away our lunch boxes and lunch containers. I realized that we haven’t really used them in a year and they were taking up a lot of accessible space that would probably be better occupied by things we actually did use. I’ve been seeing articles about pandemic fashion and how that has led people to minimize, and I feel like that’s what I did this week with our kitchen too. When I had pulled out all the containers and stacked them, they seemed like a lot, but I guess back when everyone was packing a lunch, I often felt like we didn’t have enough.

Back at the beginning of the pandemic, I really got into making these window clings from an art kit the nine year old had gotten for her birthday. Last spring, it seemed like window art was a huge source of solace and connection. Our neighorhood had various scavenger hunts where people would put things in their window for people to look for on their walks – there was a Bear Hunt and a rainbow hunt. I made all sorts of pictures and designs and one day, I asked my husband what word we should put in our window. And he said, “Resist.” It seemed appropriate at the time: resist implied health and resilience.

Making the word was a lengthy project – each letter took two to three days to make becuase you had to make the outline and wait for it to dry, and then add the colour and wait for that to dry before you could peel it and stick it to the window. But back then I was eager for tedious projects that required patience. It seemed at the begnning of the shutdown all we had was time and ourselves.

RESIST has been on our window for almost a year now. Some days, the late afternoon sun comes through the window and projects the word onto our walls. The colour has faded somewhat, but the word still shows up loud and clear. A message and a reminder. I’m contemplating adding another word to it. Not sure what, though.

What we ate:

Saturday: Brisket and Salad. On of our good friends has a smoker and he brought us some of his smoked brisket.

Sunday: can’t remember. ugh. Maybe take out???

Monday: Broccoli tofu panang curry with rice noodles.

Tuesday: Potato curry and a fennel apple salad from Fresh India.

Wednesday: Black bean burgers (from Run Fast, Cook Fast, Eat Slow), green salsa (from Bittman’s VB6 cookbook) and coconut lime cilantro rice.

Thursday: Cod soup based off a recipe from from Milk Street: Fast and Slow. This was actually a vegetarian soup leek, carrot and potatoe soup from the Milk Street Instant Pot cookbook. I threw in some cod for protein. And just used onions for the leeks.

Friday: Pizza (home made – dough from Bittman’s Dinner for Everyone cookbook) and Once Upon a Mattress – the 2005 television version of the musical. Charming and sweet. The four year old would get up and dance during the dance numbers. The double dance routines going on was adorable.