Let's start with the snow day. I think our house looks pretty in the snow, as does everything else. Will loves the snow and could only be coaxed inside with the promise of hot chocolate. I bundled Laura up and took her out, too. She tried to catch snowflakes on her tongue but I think mainly because tilting her head back gave her the best view of everything considering her hat and hood that probably gave her an obstructed perspective on her surroundings. It was especially cute whatever the reason, as are most of the things that she does.
The snow day was on Thursday. Sunday through Thursday brought a strange and tragic turn of events for our little neighborhood as we returned from IKEA Sunday night to find a police barricade and to be told that we couldn't get to our house because of a SWAT situation at our neighbors'. Our neighbor at the top of the hill, who we share a driveway with, had a gun in his house and refused to surrender to police. Suffice it to say that things like this don't really happen here. (Really, should they happen anywhere?) We later found out that he killed his wife, refused to let paramedics in to treat her and then tried to kill himself before the police shot tear gas into the house and finally got him to surrender some four hours later. We got back in our house at 10:30 but various police cars, ambulances, SWAT trucks (SWAT teams are serious business, if you've had the good fortune to have never witnessed up close), crime scene vehicles and the like were in and out all night and have been ever since.
I guess the only positive from this night is that we weren't at home for all of this. Jamison had a work dinner that he had to go to and I was planning on staying home and getting the kids in bed at their normal bedtimes. Since Laura goes to bed so early, this usually means that we're in for the night no later than five or so. But for whatever reason, we decided that we'd all go and I'd take the kids to IKEA since Will loves to play in their play area, allowing Laura and me to walk around without trying to corral Will and keep him focused on the task at hand. So then we'd pick Jamison up from his dinner and head home, which is what we did only to return to complete chaos and mayhem. I would've had to take the kids to the basement and stay there with them until the situation was resolved. By myself. I would've known that my neighbor, 50 yards from our house, from my kids' bedrooms, had a gun and was in an obviously not-stable frame of mind. I would not have handled this well. Instead, we were driving around, trying to figure out what was going on. Which I guess, all things considered, was the best situation for us to have been in.
With everything that's been going on lately and our all-violence, all-the-time culture, I tend to think that the world has gone mad. And that this is slowly becoming our new reality. A part of me wants to keep all four of us here, at home, all the time and never leave. But I know that keeping everyone home with me isn't the answer. I wish it were that simple. Plus it probably wouldn't result in the most well-adjusted of kids. But still. Life goes on, as it must.
Our lives have gone on this week to include an all-day-Monday stomach bug for Will and a possible stress fracture in Jamison's foot, in addition to the snow and cold and police goings-on at the neighbors'.
Laura has remained through everything such a sweet little girl and, with one little glance in her direction, continues to remind me that there is good in this crazy world, that most people are, in fact, genuinely good people who wish no one harm. See? (I think her hair reminds me alternately of Davy Jones and Justin Bieber. Is that strange? I feel like sometimes I go to get her up from a nap and she has more hair than she did when she went to sleep. Hopefully this suggests a future with thicker hair for her than her mother has.)
Such a sweet little girl. Her brother? Is completely and totally rotten. See?
He does everything with "his friends" right now and often requests that I take their picture. These pictures aren't ever really particularly good pictures but he seems to enjoy them. Yesterday, Hippo had a dance party for his birthday and we all held hands (which involved a good amount of finagling the stuffed friends and ourselves into a suitable arrangement in which no one was dangling at inopportune angles and locations and everyone could see the cake and birthday boy) and sang to him. I'm guessing the holding hands and singing thing comes from school since it's not something our family has ever done, at least not to my knowledge. It's still kind of foreign to me that Will has a few hours every week in which I don't really know exactly what he's doing. Welcome, but still foreign. Anyway, here they are:
Mr. Bear sustained a head wound some time ago, which you can see to the right of his eye. You can also see Hippo (Will has him in kind of a headlock) and giraffe blanket (in front of Hippo). Not pictured here is Giraffe (stuffed giraffe, not to be confused with the blanket with a giraffe on it) and Lovey. (I just realized that our naming of animals and friends around here certainly lacks creativity and individuality.) Maybe if we have another baby we'll just name it Baby (nobody would put her in a corner) or Third Child or something equally imaginative.
(How did this end up with a Dirty Dancing reference?)
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