Today begins day four that we are all home together. School has been cancelled. Church has been cancelled. When the school called yesterday, at 2:00 pm, to cancel school for today, I was a little stressed out. I actually told the kids the call was to remind them there was school the following day. I decided to worry about the fall-out of that lie when they got to school today and it was empty. But, I forgot to factor in texting, instant messaging and facebooking. My lie lasted 1.5 minutes.
Nashville must have some of the best weather people around. They forecast snow, the school district cancels school and IT SNOWS. How often, in the real world, are the weather people actually correct? I have been dumbfounded three times now to have school cancelled with blue skies and snow shows up the following day.
When I was young, this is what it looked like....
There were two criteria for which school could be called off due to severe winter weather conditions. The first was so many inches of new snow. Sadly, I am forgetting the number, but I am sure it was around 6-12 inches of new snow. The second condition was if it was 20 degrees (or more) below zero. Did I mention I grew up in Idaho? I remember kids driving snow mobiles to school.
If there was chatter around school (not internet chatter) about bad weather coming, we would get very excited about school getting cancelled. Just like the kids of today, we would plan and scheme about what we would do with a free day!
The morning of the expected school closure found us kids up and huddled around the radio, tuned to an AM station starting at 5:30 AM, praying for Madison School District to be called among the closed schools. Sometimes we would have to wait 30+ minutes for an announcement as the district had until 6 AM to make a decision regarding the school being closed.
You might be wondering if it was often our little hearts were made happy by our superintendent. Well, it wasn't often enough! One winter we were SO happy because it was 20 below for like two weeks IN A ROW!! And what did the school district do? They changed the 20 below number to 40 below and made us only get a "late" start @ 20 below!!!! They didn't get a lot of love from us after that little change. You see, in Rexburg, you could bank on multiple days out due to negative 20 degrees!
Here, in the South, they figure it is best to be prepared and cancel school 24 hours ahead of time! It is very comical.
What have we been doing with our unscheduled "winter" break you might wonder? We have played games, eaten, played with friends, played in the snow, eaten some more, went to Costco to buy more food, played more games, made a rule about ONLY playing card games as board games take way too long and we kill each other by the end, tried to watch a sacrament meeting on BYU TV with no success (yes, the kids were VERY sad about that one, made zip-lines from the upstairs to the downstairs for our Littlest Pet Shops, made snow frogs, read, watched movies, updated our facebook pictures, txted, im-ed, practiced the flute and now...blogged. I would just like to add that Oliver has been on one. Matt told me that I am the adult human and that I should just find a way to deal with Oliver. Yeah, right! Oliver can be evil!!! One day the world will know of his evil not and not say, "He is SO cute."
Here is the zip-line Kat made. Unfortunately Kat fired her mechanical engineer as he did not live up to her expectations :)
Here is the boy and his snow frogs :)
And last, but by no means least....Oliver the Devil!
I guess we will repeat everything today and hope we are getting up and on the bus by 6:30 tomorrow morning!
