Snowmageddon in Texas

Brian's birthday was right after mine.  He wanted a day out with me, so that's what we did.  Life proceeded on as normal...

Saturday chores...

Watching a movie with Luna on a winter afternoon...

And then the storm came and Texas got more than 6 inches of snow and it stuck on the ground for a week!  The Smith family is thinking, "Whoo hoo!  No school!  Stay home and play in the snow (except Hannah, she just looked at it from the porch)!"  

Our snowsuits and boots were too buried in the attic to bother with, so we just layered what we had access to.

Our back porch

Isaac is taller than Genevieve now and had to wear one of his dad's coats.  Genevieve was wearing one of mine.  Stop getting older and bigger, kids!!!

 But the rest of the city is like, "I got to hurry to the store and buy everything on the shelves in case I am trapped in the house for weeks even though I did just drive to the store in the snow and this is Texas where it never stays cold for long."  While we were staying home, enjoying the snow, and conserving water as our wter slowly shut off, other people were apparently out shopping...

Yes, this is our actual grocery store after the week was over and I decided to go try to get milk and bread.  Not happening.  It was the Corona freak out all over again, but for a way dumber reason.

Many people lost power and water for many days, we were fortunate and only lost water for a couple of days.  I just kept wondering what all these people without electricity were doing with all that refrigerated food.  I guess they were storing it in the snow.

Anyway, we went without milk and bread for a short time, the stores restocked, and it was fine.

Winter Storm in Texas

I really didn't believe it would be much accumulation, but we got around 6 inches!  This was our covered porch in the morning of Monday.

 

The boys wanted to hurry up and get out there, but it was 8 degrees in the morning so they didn't last very long and just came in after wiping out on ice a few times each, soaking wet and freezing cold.  Daddy told them he'd take them out to the back of our neighborhood to try out sledding after lunch when it was supposed to be in the twenties.  Hannah, of course, didn't really go out.  She stood on the porch and looked at it.  All our snow gear, boots and suits, are in the back of our tricky attic so we just made do with what we had, doubling up on as many layers as we could.  There were the typical tears about wearing multiple layers from Mini-Male-Hannah.

This guy was happy to get all puffy!

After their fun in the snow the older five kids watched Star Wars with Dad.  

Right before this storm hit, we got this indoor basketball goal from my sister.  It was just in time because we are looking at several snow days here, completely snowed in, and it's another outlet for energy.

Now our game room is truly Boy Paradise, complete with Legos, fooseball, and basketball.

Counting Flights, Snow in Rome, and a Long Travel Day

We made a very quick trip to Rome to attend the papal audience; more on that tomorrow.  It was so quick (only one full day in Rome) that we flew and packed only a teeny tiny backpack for all the kids with two changes of clothes plus pjs.  I only brought one change of clothes.  We brought just a few snacks, books, and tablets to keep people occupied on the plane and in restaurants.  It was officially THE lightest packing I have ever done.  

As we were waiting to take off, I started counting how many flights Bobby's been on and then tried my best to recall the same stats for all of the kids.  I am still not sure that the girls' stats are accurate, but here is what I can remember specifically.  I counted all one way flights, not including any stops along the way.  These numbers include both flights to and from Rome this time.

Bobby-11 flights in less than three years of life

Judah-

Drew

Isaac

Genevieve 

Hannah

I told Bobby that the airplane was going to be loud when it takes off.  Afterwards he looked at me and said very quietly, "I want to get off this airplane."  That's when I started counting up flights because this guy is no newbie to flying, but he had never even noticed take off before.

Upon arrival we saw the remnants of the snow.  Apparently, it never snows in Rome and this was the first time in fifteen years.  I had been looking forward to some warmer weather and while I guess it was technically warmer than in Germany, it wasn't quite what I was imagining.  It snowed the night before we left Germany so all was white when we left.

After arriving, we had to hop on a bus for a 45 minute ride to the main train station, where we switched to the Metro for another 15 minutes.  Then we walked about 10 minutes to our apartment.  We left our house at 8am and arrived at the apartment about 4:00pm.  If we had driven it would have been a travel time of about 12 hours, so we didn't save a ton of time in the end.

What a smile!

After we got situated in our apartment, we went to the Pantheon to meet Godfather Brian.  We went to a spaghetteria that was seriously amazing!

Pantheon Ceiling

After dinner, it was gelato, of course, even though it was 9:30pm and even though it was super cold.  We had an early morning planned the next day, but we survived on less than an ideal amount of sleep.

Since Italy...we do other things than just travel, sort of.

It sometimes feels like the time between trips is all about planning and packing for the next trip.  We have had no "normal" for the last two plus years.  But, alas, this is not a travel blog though it may have felt that way for the last couple of years.  We do, very rarely and occasionally just hang out at home.  Mostly we do this when my husband is traveling because he's the one with all the drive to get us going places and not waste a minute of our precious time here.  However, sometimes plans fall trough and even he ends up spending a Saturday or Sunday at home.  This is what it looks like... 

A beer, football, and cute boys in jammies!

I mentioned in some of my recent posts that we are unexpectedly moving back to the states earlier than was planned.  We'll be moving back to my home state it seems this summer.  So the list of trips got put on a different timeline and there are a few big items that we wanted to buy while we are here.  Brian and I have gone antiquing a couple of times looking for a buffet that matches our Brittany-style 100 year old table that we have loved.  We found the perfect piece at about the third place that we went.  The first two had pieces that matched, but weren't the right size, height, displace space, or storage space.  This was the one, but we were disappointed that the color was a shade lighter than our table.  After expressing that out loud, the wife of the shop owner said, "Oh, we can do that.  No problem."  Sold!

Pre-stained and fixed up...It won't be ready until sometime in February, but I am so excited.  He saw me looking at a Brittany-style napkin holder and Brian found a cool wooden shoe horn (It's weird, but our kids are in love with the shoe horns that we have seen at the apartments that we have rented all over Europe) and the owner gave them both to us as a gift.

After buying our buffet, we went to the grocery store to pick up a few things, and got coffees to go.  Then we stopped by a Doner shop and got a wrap to share.  It was a nice time together without the kids.


That evening, it started snowing and after dinner, Brian took all the kids (except Isaac because he had been really sick with fever and cough) outside to sled.  I got to talk to my brother on the phone with almost no interruptions, but Drew did get hit by a snowball and come in crying to me at one point.

Instead of sledding, Bob just ate snow for 2 hours.

A Snow Induced Sacrifice

This post seems to have gotten lost and is out of order.  The day that Nanna left, Brian had to take her to the airport.  It was a Sunday morning and so I took all the kids and went to church without him despite the flurries that started coming down and made me hesitate after getting stuck in the snow the Sunday before.  Brian was going to go to Mass during Genna's basketball game later in the day and so I felt it was our only chance to go without changing all our plans, etc.  Plus, if it did start sticking, I was thinking going later would be worse.  All this led to me going to the 9am Mass...

And then we came out of Mass to a blanket of white.  My van was covered and I scraped it off with a tiny ice scraper (all I could find in the van) as Hannah checked my messages to see if Genna still had a basketball game.  Alas, it had been cancelled, so I made the decision to go get gas which was across the street to see how the roads were on post.  I could see they were plowing the roads near me.

At the gas station I asked people how they heard the roads were off post.  They said that it had been coming down too fast and it would take the plows awhile to get around.  I had several friends at Mass offer for me to come to their house which was significantly closer than our house.  We live 45 mins away through back roads because of our detour.  However, after getting gas I messaged those friends and they had all had trouble getting home in their smaller vans.  Our friends that drive a big van like ours had gotten stuck in their village.  I made the command decision to go to the food court and hang out until the snow had topped and the plows could catch up.

This is us sitting in the food court watching the snow.  It would have been much more fun for the kids if we had some warmer clothes to play int he snow in, instead of our Mass clothes!

It was a most boring Sunday, wasting a perfectly good snow day inside, but at least we had food and toys/books that we had in the van.  We didn't risk leaving until around 3pm.

When we got home, we parked the van at the bottom of our steep part of our hill and didn't even try to get up it as it was never going to happen at this point.  There had been a few questionable hills on the way home that I barely made it to the top of, and I wasn't going to push my luck.

Brian had been hanging out because they cancelled the Mass that he was planning to go to.  The kids immediately got on their snowsuits and gloves, etc and went in the front to play while Brian shoveled the driveway and the sidewalk.

Brian ended up going to an evening German Mass.  The kids made a cave and slide with the shoveled snow and played until it was dark.  Then they came in and had hot chocolate with marshmallows.  Whew!  What a day!

Luckily, this was our last big snow until present day and we got 4 new tires the very next week with actual traction!

Meisenheim Christmas Market #6

On the feast of the Immaculate Conception, we started the day with Mass.  Driving to church it started rainy.  It had been partly sunny when we left the house.  When we walked into church it had just changed from rain to snow.  Coming out of church the ground was covered in about a half inch of snow.  In a normal car with normal tires that's not a problem, but in my giant rear wheel drive van with questionable quality tires awaiting replacement (takes forever to get parts for this over here) it is a little nerve wracking.  We were late to Brian's Christmas party as it was and the traffic was bad because of the sudden dump of snow.  Luckily, there were no really steep inclines on the way and we made it safe and sound to the party.

After the party, the sun had melted the roads and the snow looked as if it was gone.  We went home and changed for the next Christmas market.  It was still very cold, so we dressed in lots of layers.  Hannah really didn't want to go, and Drew and Judah were also asking to stay home.  She ended up babysitting them while the rest of us took Brian's mom to the market.  It was about 30 minutes away. 

One of the first stalls was a couple of Germans who sang country music and loved Texas.  We stopped to chat with them.  His first words were, "Texas is the best place on earth."  This market was full of woodwork crafts.  We got a couple of candles made of wood and a candle holder carved out of a tree trunk.  There was various live music all along the walk through the Christmas market.  At the very last stall I found myself a nice winter hat since Genevieve has taken over my hat from last year and she looks too beautiful in it for me to take it back.

Speaking of taking my clothes, it looks like that day has finally arrived.  Hannah wore my shirt to the Christmas party.

Christmas Market Buddies

It started snowing as we were already walking to the van and the drive home was rough.  It's dumping snow that fast these days.