Cabin Fever

Hey everyone!  We are all experiencing some serious stir-crazy around here.  How about you?

There is much fighting/whining/fit-throwing between brothers, frustration among parents, and general antsy-ness all around.  I was hoping that school starting again this week would calm some of this, but it hasn't.  Every day William comes home from school with a mind-numbing explosion of pent-up energy.  He literally dances and jumps around as he tries to talk to me.  If you have every tried to listen to someone who is jumping up and down as they talk to you, you know that it makes you dizzy!  The frigid temps are keeping the kids inside from recess, so that doesn't help. 

Henry and Jack are having the same problem, plus a little too much togetherness, I think.  As I sit at my computer trying to work all day, I have taken to constantly yelling for one of them to come be with me.  Henry and I have started doing kindergarten worksheets in an effort to start making him sit down and concentrate on something and/or complete something he starts.    He is getting better each day and I'm hopeful that when kindergarten comes around he'll stop saying, "I forget" to every question someone asks him!

Jack just tries to climb on me.  He has three new moves.  First, he grabs a fistful of my hair with each hand and pulls it straight out to the sides and says, "look at your hair!"  Second, he takes my face in both of his little hands and says, "you are my best friend."  How cute is that?  And third, he looks at me with a very serious face and says, "can't you be happy?" if I'm not smiling.  When I smile he says, "Ahhh, that's nice."

Yesterday afternoon when William got home bouncing around, as usual, I decided it was time to go outside regardless of the temperature.  There was a whole backyard of fresh snow to play in!  Surely that would calm people down.  It took a full 20 minutes to find and put on boots, snowpants, gloves, scarves, hats, and coats.  For some reason we don't seem to have boots that fit Henry so I actually stuck his feet with two layers of socks into plastic bags before putting his shoes on.  He looked ridiculous, but I was crossing my fingers it would at least keep him dry for a few minutes.  We all traipsed outside and I encouraged the boys to run, stomp, and roll around.  I stood almost perfectly still trying to shield myself from the wind.  We lasted a grand total of 20 minutes out there.  The boys wanted to stay out longer, but everyone was turning an unnatural shade of red.  The snow wasn't as fun as we had hoped either because it is so cold, it isn't wet enough to make snowballs or anything fun.

My plan sort of worked though, since the rest of the night was a little more peaceful than the previous two weeks.  All I needed to do was expose my children to the possibility of hypothermia to get a little peace!