Winter, et al

Hey, check it out, it's that girl that used to blog!!! Sadly, this is {hides head in shame} my first blog post this year. And I would like to pretend that I had a really, really good reason for that, but the truth is that I just never really felt like blogging at any moment between then and now when I was near a computer.

"Hey, that's why they invented Twitter, you twerp!" shout the readers.

"Shut it!" says the blogger.

Anyway, we remain firmly in the grasp of a very cold winter. You would probably assume, given the constant coverage of the polar vortex, the incredibly cold temperatures throughout the midwest and the almost Biblically cold and icy weather in the South, that we got an incredibly cold winter. You would, however, sort of be wrong. Not that it hasn't been cold - it has - but it just hasn't been that much colder than normal. There was a day in January when the high temperature in Chicago was about 4 below, the high in Atlanta was 16 and the high here was about 17.

Not that 17 isn't cold...but it's not really newsworthy around here like those other places were. I feel like we had one or two days where it never got about 10, which is not really that abnormal. So, I don't want to say that we got spared the wrath of the cold that has blanketed the rest of the country, but relatively we got off a little bit easy.

Enough about the weather, though...

The girls are not really loving winter: it is often a chore to convince them that they should go outside on weekend days. They like playing in the snow, for a couple of minutes, but given the choice on a normal, cold Saturday, they would rather play inside all day. That usually seems like an acceptable idea until approximately nap time, when they get antsy and tired all at the same time, but not tired enough to take a nap and therefore just really kind of unmanageable... Which leads to some bribery "You can have hot cocoa when we come back if we go for a walk first," seems to work in most situations.

They will, gasp, be four in two months. Yikes. They start kindergarten a year from September! They are just such little people now...they can pick out their clothes and dress themselves and tell me what they want for dinner, or for lunch the next day, and tell jokes and stories and stuff. They have substantially different personalities, which is sort of neat, and they have really different like and dislikes (if you see then, MA is the one wearing pink...at all times...and LK is the one wearing blue or grey.)

And Munchkin continues to just basically be awesome at life. She and Frenchie are still "not together", although they clearly sort of are. She spent a week in Paris over his winter break, most of it with him (although she also visited her roommate). I dunno, it makes sense to her, and she seems cool with it. There are also some other boys, but nothing terribly serious. We still have dinner every Thursday, although we have branched out and don't always eat chicken fingers in the same place anymore.

We are also headed to Tortolla tomorrow for a very long weekend. Girls only! Kind of a last minute trip that can be categorized as a "mental health refresher". Smoking Hot Roommate, Big Sis, a cousin of theirs, Munchkin and I are going and the entire agenda is to sit around and enjoy the sun. Obviously, given my complaining up top about the weather, I am pretty darn excited for this. The Boy gets the girls all to himself, and he also gets absolved of having to buy me something for Valentine's Day. Maybe not a totally fair trade, but don't tell me I am not thoughtful:-).

Other than that, I have nothing super important to tell you, other than my current case of acute Olympic fever:-)