snow eve

Will it snow in Alabama tomorrow? Dare we even hope? Dennis has been asking me to build snowmen for a month now and he'll glance out the window and announce "there's no snow outside, Mommy" so disappointedly. I hope for his sake we get at least 2 inches. We have braved the grocery store and stocked up (today was our planned day to shop and we were there with all the extra pre-snow shoppers). The bread selection was horrible, of course--all the good stuff was sold out before we got there. May there be enough snow to provide that kind of white, quiet, exquisite beauty that only fresh snow creates but not enough to interrupt our electrical service as that is our only source of heat in this house.

I've been missing my dog some today as expected, and Dennis was asking me this afternoon if I'd seen any sick animals. I assured him I had not. We put food out in the bird feeders this afternoon hoping to help out the little guys if it does snow. Other than the grocery shopping, it's been a peaceful and ordinary day, and tonight we had a quiet family meal and celebrated the Feast of the Epiphany in our own small way.

Last night the grandparents were over to eat a big chili supper (David had the urge to make a gluttonously huge pot of chili and we decided to share). Dennis was excited to entertain everyone and when he couldn't convince us all to come into his room after supper to watch him construct train routes, he brought the action to the living room. Immediately upon finishing dessert (Gran's yummy lemon meringue pie), he announced "let's go play trains everybody" and then turned to Mom and said "Gran you can't do dishes, you have to play with me". None of us had mentioned the dishes but loading the dishwasher is our usual after supper routine--I'm pleased that he picked up on that. But I'm not as pleased as Gran was when he told her she wasn't allowed to help out! He did another funny and amazing thing--he was playing with the Thomas Trackmaster trains and track (the electric ones) and told his grandmothers that he needed more tracks from Wal-Mart. He was ready to go and help them buy it ("we have to go pay for tracks at Wal-Mart") right then. The amazing happened when he asked for batteries for the engines. We told him we didn't have any and he went to his room and got his new Tyke Light. He brought it to Gran and said "we get the batteries out of my night light for the train" and then said "we need a screwdriver to get the batteries out". Pretty impressive thought process going on there, though the nightlight batteries were AAA and not the AA that the trains required. He went off and found a screwdriver on his own, completely unsatisfied by our insistence that the batteries were different, and he persisted so long that we took some AA batteries out of something else to let him use them in the trains. This made him pretty happy.

I caught him building train routes twice today--once it got too quiet while I was unloading the dishwasher and I found him in the middle of our bed with his wooden tracks all set up on the bed. The second time was when David and I were rearranging the den furniture and doing some vacuuming (it is still necessary for Dennis to hide from the vacuum)--I found him building a Trackmaster setup in the bathroom. Thomas was chugging mightily toward our toilet. And speaking of toilet, we did have one potty success today, but my excitement over that was tempered by a peeing-on-the-rug incident not too long afterward. Oh, well. We'll get there.

Oh please let it snow, Lord. We are so very hopeful!