sunny day chasing the clouds away

so, we woke up this morning to bright shining sun! yippee! and also: snow and ice! yesterday we had full-on east-coast-ish torrential rain, and last night's snow was totally unexpected. school unfortunately was not even delayed,(the scrooges!) even tho the roads were still completely icy. our car was buried under a sheet of ice, and francis had fun hacking at it with the scraper.



he threw some snow at me all excited, and of course, me having just woken up and pulled on clothes to take him to school, and greg to work, didn't take it very well. we may never get snow again for the rest of the year, and what do i do on this precious day? i snap at him some stupid lame-o vague guidelines like: "don't throw snow at someone unless they're ready, or are already in a snowball fight with you." (?) (sigh) so many times, our little parenting moments that we can set by example, or leave nice memories, are not big moments that we can prepare for, but those little moments that sneak up on us and catch us at our worst. my wish is that hopefully the good moments that i have will someday outweigh the bad moments, for i fear they are many. luckily for me at that moment, i had greg, who had my back. he told me afterwards that he rolled his eyes at me, and he and francis had a little secret boyish snicker behind my back. boys. he could say he was sorry, but it didn't stop him from still thinking that it was totally funny to smack your mama with snow. i need to lighten up.

greg has a phrase that we use in this house alot; it's called, simply: "guy/girl". we use it to point out to eachother things that, under the exact same circumstances, we react completely differently. we like to blame it on our gender. off the top of my head, a good example would be from the early days of the phrase: one time when our friends kevin and karen came over, i had just finished putting up an overhead shelf in our entryway the day before. karen came in, walked thru the hallway, paused, and looked around, and said: "something's different. did you rearrange the furniture?" i said no. she said confused: "huh. cause something feels totally different here. like the light is different or something...that's really weird." and i said: "well, i DID put a shelf up there yesterday" and she looks up, and exclaims: "oh my goodness! wow! you did that by yourself? kevin, look! she put a shelf up there!" and kevin said: "i know." and karen said: "how did you know? did they tell you?" and he said: "i noticed it first thing when we walked in." and karen says: "then why didn't you say anything?" and kevin said: "what for?" and then greg marched in, whooped, and said "guy/girl right there, folks! guy/girl!" and he and kevin hi-fived, and we all had a good laugh. and that's really about all it's good for. a good laugh at eachother. i wouldn't recommend using it in a real argument, though. i don't think-- "you know,hon, i didn't take out the trash because: i didn't remember! guy/girl! hahaha!"--would go over very well.

anyways. it's sunny outside, i have the car today, and i had planned to do more errands (i feel like all i've been doing these past few weeks is errands, errands, errands!) but on the way home, i was reminded of the side streets, which were still, at 9:30am, quite icy.



so i decided to come home, have a nice breakfast, make my coffee, and catch up on my blog, and do my shopping later this afternoon, when the sun has sufficiently melted the roadways some.



i haven't felt like writing lately. i've been doing alot of reading. alot of hibernating. it is still winter, afterall. i've just finished reading the first three books in a series that francis discovered, called percy jackson and the olympians, by rick riordan. mainly, i read the first one to see what he was reading. then i really liked it, and wanted to read the rest. we've had good discussions, and googled alot about greek mythology. the books cleverly throw the greek myths back into modern times by way of: since gods are immortal, they are not dead. just no one believes in them anymore. and the monsters are still alive and breathing, and trying to hunt down all the half-bloods: the children of gods and mortals. these half-bloods are recruited to a camp, where they are trained to be warriors, by none other than Chiron himself (immortal centaur who trained hercules and achilles). percy has to go on a quest, to retrieve zeus' stolen lightning bolt and stop the gods from going to war with eachother, and he also must venture into the underworld to save his mother. of course he encounters all sorts of (familiar) monsters of legend, but he has two friends at his side, and trusty weapons: gifts of the gods. and there is also the forboding prophecy. all kinds of heavy stuff, but it's told from percy, in his voice, and he's in the sixth grade. and boys have a way of dealing with things with a shrug of their shoulders, and a determination of will. guy/girl. i enjoy the books, for me, but i also find them useful, as a mother, in helping me understand francis better, a boy's point of view.
for example: book 2, the sea of monsters, chapter 14--we meet the sheep of doom:
..."when you think "monster island", you think craggy rocks and bones scattered on the beach like the island of the Sirens. the Cyclop's island was nothing like that. i mean, okay, it had a rope bridge across a chasm, which was not a good sign. you might as well put up a billboard that said: SOMETHING EVIL LIVES HERE. but except for that, the place looked like a caribbean postcard...

i've also just finished reading "the children's homer: the adventures of odysseus and the tale of troy." it is significantly shorter than the originals, only 248 pages. in my googling the story,(wikepedia fills in the gaps nicely)i discovered a tv movie called the odyssey, which we rented this weekend. i wanted to read him the book first, but we're already reading peter pan, and he's already in the middle of his second book of percy jackson. i wanted him to be familiar with more of the greek myths that he'll encounter in the book. there's not too many movies out there to familiarize yourself with them. there is "clash of the titans" which is embarrassingly bad, but sufficient story-wise. there is "jason and the argonauts" which is much better, even tho it's filmed in the 60's. we've seen them both. the odyssey movie was filmed in 1997, and i should have watched it first. we had to cover his eyes alot. the war scenes were gruesome, the monsters were gruesome, and the islands of calypso, and circe, were maybe too sexy for a 9 year old. so it wasn't really a kids movie. but then again, we watched "the nativity story" the week before, and the birthing scenes were a bit gruesome, the soldiers were abducting the jewish baby boys and killing them, and he covered his eyes there too. the stories of the bible are just as gruesome. war and death and evil are everywhere. it's all the moral of the story that's important, i guess. the thing i'm trying to expose francis to. the things we maybe don't see everyday, but can learn from, and store up, for the times that we need them. like courage. and love. and hope. having faith. choosing what's right, and following it, no matter what. i do try...