Snow Day

An unexpected gift

My husband and I have vastly different sleep/wake schedules. Dan’s alarm is set for 4am (though he often gets out of bed much earlier!), so that he can get into the office before the glaziers arrive at 7am and he can’t get anything done. He leaves the house right around the time my alarm goes off at 5:30. You can imagine, then, that he goes to sleep way before I’m ready. It used to be that we would head upstairs to watch something on television after dinner, and then he would turn out his light and I would head downstairs with my book. However, since he confessed that he would rather have me with him at night, I have been either reading with a book light or playing games on my phone while listening to an audiobook. It’s peaceful there in the dark, decompressing from the day with Dan slumbering — occasionally with a snore or a in-his-sleep nonsense babble — beside me.

Lately, we don’t even have our after-dinner together time! I go from school, to directing the high school one act play, to rehearsal for Fiddler on the Roof. By the time I get home, Dan has already been asleep for a couple of hours. He mumbles incoherently at me as I crawl into bed, sighing as my body relaxes and I sip at a cup of peppermint tea.

You might recall that we have children. Emily does not risk the wrath of her father by coming in to see me after lights out — she will send me a text if she needs something. Billy, on the other hand, has no such qualms. Not only does he barge into our room as soon as he gets home (he’s a teenager, so I usually beat him home even with play practice) to give me a hug and a kiss and an update on the goings-on about town. Does he whisper? Absolutely not. Does it bother him when Dan grumbles? Also no. The situation was compounded on this past Tuesday night because oh my gosh there is so much snow and Hunter went in the ditch and here is the picture he sent me and there is NO WAY we are going to have school good night Mom I love you!

Billy was so confident, in fact, that he parked his truck behind my garage door. This is dangerous because I leave for school before he does, so he risks either my backing into his truck, or my screaming from the garage that he’d better get his butt down there and move it. Lucky boy, he happened to be right.

Snow days are special. If you grew up in a Snow State, you know what I mean. You know the feeling of listening to the radio, watching the news on TV, or refreshing the district website (depending on your generation) and waiting for your school to be added to the cancellation list. You know the feeling of this free day, this bonus day with nothing to do except (obviously) PLAY IN THE SNOW. As an adult who is still affected by the whims of Mother Nature — sorry to those of you who have totally grown-up jobs you still have to do even when there’s a blizzard — I play as well, it just sometimes looks a bit different.

It needs to be stated that, at this point in my life, I have absolutely zero guilt about taking the day off. Last Friday we had a day off because teachers worked until 7pm two days that week for conferences, so we get a day to make up for it. I resolutely stayed in my pajamas, drank a pot of coffee, and finished half a book. Monday was President’s Day, so I read the other half of the book with more coffee.

Snow Days are special, however, so on the heels of two such days I felt I needed to be extra decadent. I’m 100% sure I would be supported by my friend Jess, who was famous for her “Snow Dance” she would perform in her middle school social studies classroom. It was elaborate, and often enacted on top of her desk (she was a petite lass), and our friend Maira and I believe that she does it for us still… wherever she is.

Consequently, I did not shut off my alarm and make coffee when I got the “School Cancelled” alert; I went back to sleep. I slept on and off until TEN O’CLOCK AM, Dear Readers. I do not remember the last time I had quite such a lie in. When I finally awoke, I brought coffee and tater tot hotdish (do NOT yuck my yum) back up to my bedroom and proceeded to watch all 4 available episodes of the latest season of Bridgerton.

Friends, it was glorious.

Now, because I try to be upfront and honest with you, I will confess that it was a bit too much self-indulgence. We had a 4 day weekend, then one school day that involved a FIELD TRIP (uff da), and then an unexpected day off. It was a good thing I had to go to rehearsal in the evenings of all three days, or I would have been worse off. As it was, I ended up with some mild anxiety at the end of the snow day — a physical and mental discomfort that is made all the worse by not being able to pinpoint a source. It made me think: If I was struggling with all of this unstructured time, how were my students faring? It is any wonder that they were a bit of a mess when they eventually came back to our classroom?

All this aside, every single kid came in with grins and stories of the forts they made in the new snow, or how much they slept, or what video games they got to play. They all felt the magic of the Snow Day.

Oh, and now that Billy can run the snowblower, Snow Days aren’t the bummer for Dan that they used to be… even if he still has to go to work at 5am.

Thanks for reading.

Love, Susie

Snow Days Past — November 2016