Sunday, December 21, 2008
Friday we got about six inches of a very white powdery snow. It was beautiful. It completely transformed our cold and gray neighborhood into the most festive Winter Wonderland. Anyway, out here in CT if you don't shovel PDQ (pretty darn quick) you can get a ticket for like $200. Our poor old lady neighbor got one a few years back and 24 hours hadn't even passed since the snow had stoppped. Plus, Mark had piano lessons Saturday morning. So as beautiful as the snow looked outside covering the sidewalks and stairs, it had to go. Usually the shoveling falls on my shoulders. Yeah, I've shoveled almost every winter storm we've had out here on my own, minus the driveway. Mark always does the driveway, or at least part of it, usually after he scrapes my frozen, frost-bitten body off the driveway where I've fallen, completely exhausted. I've gone out into the bitter cold faithfully, with every snowstorm, three babies strapped to my back, fresh c-section wounds still bleeding. Okay, not really, but you get my point. Shoveling around here is just like washing laundry or cooking dinner or cleaning the toilets or paying the bills. My job. Mark will always do it but not in the timely fashion I like him to do it in--a.k.a. before we get a ticket. So I do it.
 Yesterday however, a true miracle happened. It's called a snowblower. Mark, who very rarely gets out of bed before eight, was dressed and headed out into the Winter Wonderland by 7:45a.m. And by 9:00a.m. he had cleared the snow not only from our driveway and walkways but also from our neighbor's driveway and walkway! I've never seen him so happy and excited over a piece of machinery in our entire 12 years together. He loved it so much that after we got back from sledding he just had to get it out again to remove the 1/4 inch of snow that had fallen between 9 and noon. The family we bought it from (for 100 bucks--you can't beat that) even called because they'd heard we'd had a snowstorm and wanted to know if we'd used it yet. Darin was clearly missing his piece of machinery and probably would have come and snowblowed for us if he wasn't living all the way down in Texas. Anyway, looks like my shoveling days are over and if we move anywhere, it's gonna have to be a snowy place and the snowblower will definitely be the first thing on the moving van.
Besides snowblowing and piano lessons and sledding, I also managed to make the eighth treat of Christmas which is basically called "anything you like to eat dipped in chocolate" but not steak or mashed potatoes. I made chocolate dipped Pringles and chocolate dipped Pretzels. Just melted some chocolate chips in the double boiler and dunked in the salty stuff and let it dry on some waxed paper. Then we ran over to the church so we could decide if the boys need the microphone for their musical number or if they could do without. We hit the mall for dinner and a few random items from Target and then headed out to see Christmas lights. We've found a few awesome displays here and there and the boys, especially Caleb and the twins, love them. We went to see this one a few weeks ago (thanks to a tip from the Cousins) and Noah said, "Wouldn't it be awesome if it played that song (Wizards in Winter) like that house on You Tube?" And then like two seconds later, that song came on. He was thrilled! And then there's this house just a few blocks away from us that puts up this huge display every year complete with a toy train that circles the house. Mark also found another awesome house not too far away, but my camera didn't work so too bad. Really someone oughtta start a website where people can post videos and addresses of houses with awesome Christmas light displays so we'd know where to find them all. That would be really cool.
We ended the day running to the grocery store for two things--hot chocolate and peanut butter sauce. Yesterday after sledding we came home and had hot chocolate. As an experiment, I tried squirting a little Reeses Peanut Butter Ice Cream topping in my Stephen's Hot Chocolate. The results were delicious. Any of you Reeses Peanut Butter Cup lover's have got to try it! And attention all you East Coast Residents: I just discovered Stephen's Hot Chocolate at Shaws. Hurray for us! No more mail orders from this chic or loading my suitcase with the stuff everytime I visit Utah. I can get it here. And trust me, if you haven't tried Stephens Hot Chocolate you're totally missing out. It's the best.
posted by Shana # 7:28 AM 
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