Snowed In

Our neighborhood, mid-week.

Maya catches snowflakes when the snow first starts to fall.

Zayd smiles at Gaga!

It has now officially been one week since I have been able to go anywhere by car. We've been out a couple of times to sled on our hill, but it's hard to get out there with them to supervise safe sledding with a tiny baby! I was so desperate to escape on Tuesday that I went and sat in my snow-covered minivan for 30 minutes. It was like being in a cocoon. Very dark and peaceful. I didn't really want to go back in, but K made me paranoid about carbon monoxide poisoning after telling me to be sure the snow wasn't blocking the exhaust pipe. It was too cold to sit out there with no heat, but when I started hallucinating headaches and visualizing my own sad death-by-stupidity, I gave up the peace and went back inside to embrace my chaos.

The weather people have been promising a big melt for days now, and it just keeps snowing, instead. K tells me it's raining in the lowlands, but up in our elevated neighborhood, nothing but snow, snow, and more snow. The children and I are a little (make that a lot) stir-crazy!

Can it be that baby Zayd is going to be two months old already on Sunday?? It seems that just a couple of weeks ago I was racking up the medical bills (approximately $50,000 before insurance, is that not insane?) waiting for the baby to turn. My C-section worries are long forgotten, my precious little one is starting to get over his baby acne (the worst case one of mine has had since Mina,) and his beautiful smile eases the strain of confinement. I'm afraid he's going to be crawling before I know it!

Rayan is talking more, though it's still not understandable by those outside of our immediate family. He'll start special-needs preschool next month for 3 hours per week, with a couple more hours devoted solely to speech therapy. Maya is becoming much more imaginative in her play, and amuses us with talk of "stunks" (aka skunks) and general bunny-ness.

Maya the bunny pirate with her bunny parrot on her shoulder. She came up with that on her own!

Layth has become quite a reader, and our days of spelling things out to keep them a secret are behind us. He saw WALL-E for the first time this week and has watched it every day since. It reminds us of Mina's obsession with The Lion King. It was the first Blu-Ray movie I've watched on our new Blu-Ray player, and wow! What a joy movies have become. At least we have a great entertainment system to amuse us while we're buried under all this snow.

Speaking of being buried under snow, the look on our cat's face when she dashed between my feet in her usual attempt to escape and found herself belly-deep in snow was priceless.