I am working the camera
The weather reports last night promised a lot of snow, but I didn’t believe it because they promise and promise piles of snow and then it rains. But lo and behold, this time we got a noticeable (4-5 inches) amount of white fluff. It was bad enough that the schools announced they were close the previous evening (and there was much rejoicing among the spawn). The roads were bad enough (and we didn’t want to shovel out the drive so early) that we kept Alice home as well for a full house of family togetherness.
We eventually had the entire family out shoveling, which let us keep up with the 60+ year old grandmother across the street. I set it up for Corwin as a learning experience, assigning him a specific section of the driveway (about a third), rather than a time limit, so that his normal tactic of operating at the minimum level to avoid constant negative stimulus. I had to strip off my coat because I was overheating, but Corwin stayed fully bundled up the entire time, which provides a rough upper bound on his intensity of work. I told him could work as slow and inefficiently as he liked, but he wasn’t coming in until his section was clear. He still took much longer than necessary, but at least he was outside and I didn’t have to listen to complaints that Alice wasn’t helping.
In the afternoon we went out for some sledding with Jack and his mom. The older boys didn’t last much longer than Charles and Alice — both of them had to do driveway clearing and that apparently wore them out for the day. Alice took one ride down and then sat on Mom’s shoulders for the rest of the outing.
Charles had a break down in to tears when told he was going sledding, but we, cruel beings of Utter Evil that we are, forced him to go along anyway instead of leaving him home alone. You can hear his piteously whining during his forced descent in this video:
Very sad. Despite this, when pressed upon returning home, Charles admitted that he had “medium” fun.
