A Brand New Snow Has Covered All I Know, Can't Find a Footprint in the Field*

We are approaching a record snow fall for the month of January, here in the Midwestern Tundra I call home. We are about to surpass the year that we had a full fledged blizzard.

At this point, much of the snow has stopped being pretty and it's just slushy and messy and black and hiding parking spaces.

I think I need one of those magic lights - you know the kind that trick your body into believing the sun is shining, or something like that.

It's grey and dismal and it leaves me feeling grey and dismal. I am so sick of boots and icy sidewalks and salt on EVERYTHING. (For those of you who never lived in the Great Lakes region, we use salt instead of sand to keep the roads passable. It's effective, but it creates a layer of salt on cars, shoes, etc.)

The economy has me completely FREAKED OUT. I suspect I am not alone in this. Am I wrong?

We attempted to take Lana out for Vietnamese food last Friday night, and arrived at the restaurant to find it was no longer there. I was sad about this on more than one level. Firstly, the aforementioned economy freak-out. Secondly, now the nearest place to get Vietnamese food for Lana is 45 minutes away in Ann Arbor. And thirdly (and honestly, probably the biggest reason I was upset and go ahead, be disgusted with me if you must), is that I am pretty sure it was the last place in town where a person with a bubble-tea-addiction could feed said bubble-tea-addiction.

We left the defunct Vietnamese restaurant and made our way to a Thai restaurant. (And yes, I KNOW that Thai food and Vietnamese food are not the same. I'm not a total moron or suffering from some sort of simple notion that any southeast Asian food can be supplemented for the food of my daughter's early childhood. But it was the closest thing I could come up with that didn't involved driving to Ann Arbor.) They have Vietnamese summer rolls at this particular Thai restaurant, which was really the only thing Lana was concerned about. She was very happy to have two orders of summer rolls, and she shared Husband's pad thai.

On Sunday we went to a Lunar New Year celebration with many, many other families from our Families with Children from Asia group. Lana was completely freaked out by how many people were there, and she didn't seem to be feeling very well. She clung to Husband or to our friend L~, and she refused to eat - even her very favorite things: dumplings and steamed rice.

She had a rough night Sunday night, and ended up in bed with Husband and I, which is, truthfully, odd for her. With the exception of the sleep screaming episodes we experienced last year, Lana is generally a sound sleeper. 99% of the time, she falls asleep at 9:00 PM and we don't hear from her again until 7:30 or 8:00. (This is so bizarre for me that I cannot count how many times I have opened her bedroom door to make sure she is still alive. Gabe is such a horrible and brief sleeper that it boggles my mind that a child might regularly sleep almost 11 hours a night.)

Please note that I am knocking a giant piece of wood that this statement doesn't come back to bite me in the a**. I seriously think I have some sort of Post Traumatic Stress Reaction when I think about the first three years of Gabe's life and I am terrified that that kind of sleep-deprivation could befall us again.

Where am I going with this post? I have no idea. It's snowy. It's grey. It's depressing. Lunar New Year was a bust...

And now I've got to go put the kids to bed. If you've suffered through this entire miserable post, my apologies. I'll try to come up with something funny/amusing/better soon.

LM

* Greg Trooper, December Skies from his album Floating