We’ve had a lot of snow. Snow at Christmas, snow again last week, snow again yesterday. Big big storms. So now we’ve got a big big pile of snow in front of our house. I’ve had to knock the pile over closer to the house twice so far just so we can continue to pile more snow on top of the pile near the drive way and sidewalk. As a small child who doesn’t have to shovel though, I can see how Josie thinks it’s pretty neat. It is also very useful for getting some of her energy out with climbing up and down and around. These pictures are from last week’s storm. Now the snow pile is up so high and so wide that I can toss Josie off of our front porch onto the top of the pile, and she can look directly into our front windows of the house while standing on it.

Ouch my aching back. Yesterday’s storm we were down a shoveler because our neighbor was out of town so we hired some teenagers to work on it, but I still put in a good two hours in addition to three of them working for an hour and a half plus Jordi doing some too. We also joined forces with our neighbors and had Ethan and Zach at our house so all the kids could be together and three adults could shovel at once.

Weekend before last we had a thunderstorm with crazy rain and wind. We had some micro-surges they said which brought down part of the tree in front of our house and treated us to no power for about 24 hours whereas the rest of the street had it back by morning. We were watching the storm and suddenly it was a total whiteout like in a blizzard and then bam the major branch came down and out went the power. An entire tree came up blocking the entire street towards Mass Ave too.

Josie was initially scared by the storm, but once we taught her that the light flashes (lightning) would be followed by booms (thunder), she was highly amused and predicting the booms each time. Cats were scared into hiding in bed and other dark places.

Unfortunately the following Sunday we again lost a branch from our tree, this time it fell in the street (yah for us!) onto a car (boo for the car owner!) in the middle of the night. Hopefully this tree can keep the rest of its limbs.

A week ago Friday we had a very domestic day, we bought and planted flowers in the morning and then made and served cookies to our friends in the afternoon. Josie was a huge fan of gardening and got completely covered in mud, I was pretty dirty too and so I didn’t want to touch the camera that way. We put in over 30 plants in an hour and a half, including the weeding. Josie is a speedy planter, I had to just constantly dig holes for her to keep plopping more plants into. The plants thankfully seem to have survived the toddler treatment. She helped weed, dig, plant, water and mulch. Well on her way to having a green thumb, as compared with my black one. I already killed one plant this year through neglect. We planted hostas, impatiens, and begonias.