Snow Day Serenity

“Today might be a good day to start macrodosing. Microdosing won’t be enough.” 

Tighe and I had both gone down to the basement to look for painter’s tape for an art project that Tess was begging to start, but also for some quiet. The three boys were stomping around upstairs in their wet snow boots and sopping wet snow pants, dripping little puddles of water across the hardwoods on the first floor. 

“I’m trying really hard to be chill here, but they’re just making such a mess, and it’s only 9:30,” I continued.

It was a snow day. Semi-justified, I guess. More snow than last time, but because the weather was warmer, it was mostly slush again.

I don’t mind a snow day for the most part. A random day mid-week when we can all sleep in and have nowhere to go. No carpools, no after-school playdates, no basketball practices, and as long as we played our cards right the night before, no homework.

Because it was a wet snow and not a good sledding snow, Nate and Sam realized it was ripe for making snow cones. With all the thick, sugary, sticky flavored syrups Nate had gotten for Christmas to go with his snow cone maker. So it was 9:30 in the morning and they were upstairs getting high on sugar and making a colossal mess. 

Lou’s lips were already stained grape purple. Plus a little Greek yogurt from his breakfast less than an hour earlier. 

Serenity now. 

My goal on days like this is always to let whatever happens happen. They’ll all be in school tomorrow, I told myself. We can clean up the mess at the end of the day, before we sit down for dinner. It’s one day. Just one day. 

Serenity now. 

An hour later, Tess was still working diligently with her painter’s tape. Her birthday party was on Friday afternoon, at our house. Fourteen girls. I had gotten canvases and paints for each of them, but with absolutely zero plan otherwise. 

Fortunately, Tess and I had done a little DIY googling and decided to tape the first initial of each girl’s name on the canvas. Each girl can paint the rest of the canvas and, when the paint dries, remove the tape to reveal a monogrammed masterpiece. Or something like that.

So Tess was busy taping each girl’s initial on the canvases. Thus, she was quiet. Aside from an occasional frustrated squeal when the tape would get twisted or stuck to itself, as tape does. But I was able to be largely hands-off

Naturally, I had purchased an extra canvas for Sam because he’s Sam, so he was busy setting up his workspace, gathering the right paints and paintbrushes and gazing at his blank canvas envisioning his own potential show-stopping masterpiece. He had a plan, so I was able to be largely hands-off again, though I intervened to lay down a layer of cardboard before he got started. 

I also helicoptered in to lift the paint-soaked 4-inch paintbrush he had nonchalantly set down on the table—NOT on the protective cardboard. He was quiet, but not mess-free. 

Serenity now.

Nate and Lou, meanwhile, were playing some sort of sadism game, where older brother would stuff younger brother into the large plastic storage bin that had earlier held boots and snow pants and drag it around the foyer at a high speed until it toppled over and younger brother spilled out. They were engaged, I was able to be hands-off yet again. Though Lou’s shrieks were shattering and mind-numbing. Each time, I was jarred into a brief, yet torturous, migraine.

Serenity. 

Now. 

Tighe had retreated to his office and locked the door. 

I have a desk tucked into a dormer window in our master bedroom, but with the amount of open paint jars floating around and the number of shrieks piercing the otherwise quiet winter air, I didn’t feel totally comfortable disappearing just yet. Plus, Tighe had a really stressful afternoon at work the day before and was anticipating another such day today, so I had resolved to keep everyone out of his way. I’d do my best!

A short time later, Tess and Sam were still hard at work, Nate was busy not doing the homework that it turns out he hadn’t done the day before, and Lou, donning oversized ski goggles for some reason, was requesting a frozen waffle. And when Lou requests a frozen waffle, he means he wants a frozen waffle.

Like, he actually eats it while it’s still frozen.

Without syrup. 

Just gliding around the house on his Strider bike, waffle thawing in one hand, steering with the other hand, ski goggles propped up on his forehead. Like a WWI fighter pilot. Or Kenny from Can’t Hardly Wait.

Fast-forward another hour and Tess and Lou were eating bowls of mac and cheese at the dining room table where I was simultaneously scraping at specks of acrylic paint with my finger nail. Nate and Tess had also experimented with the spare canvases and despite their best efforts—truly, they were sincerely trying not to be messy—paint was everywhere. 

Nate had been attempting a starry night imitation, so he was flicking the paintbrush across the canvas, but of course, the paint speckles weren’t restricted to his target area. The result actually looked pretty good, as did Sam’s painting of a sunset with a silhouette of a tree and cabin cast in the foreground.

“I’ll probably wait until tomorrow to try and sell this,” he had said, propping it up on a cardboard box to dry.

One of his friends had appeared at the front door just before lunchtime and they immediately retreated up to the third floor to fiddle with Legos and listen to gangster rap. I think there are some parental controls on whatever device they’re using, but at the rate Lou’s dropping F-bombs lately, maybe not.

Serenity now.

I strolled through the foyer and my legs nearly gave out beneath me because of the mess. I only have four kids, so there should not be 145 pairs of boots, yet there they were, all strewn about carelessly on the rug. I had told the kids to loosely drape their snow pants and coats on the banister and steps so that they would dry. They did so, but they were all inside out and somehow, like the boots, there were definitely more clothes than there are kids. 

Not to mention gloves, scarves and hats. Lou and Nate had come in to change out wet gloves for dry ones at one point. And Sam had come in for an extra scarf. Plus Sam’s friend is here. So that accounts for some of the excess, but not all. 

Serenity. 

I straightened a bit of the apparel, at least creating a walkway, and by the time I returned to the dining room, Tess had spread out some origami paper and queued up some how-to videos on YouTube. 

Origami seems like a good hobby for Tess. Quiet, mess-free. As soon as she took an interest in it, I ordered her 300 sheets of origami paper, thrilled that she’d have a nice rainy day activity.

Except that Tess gets easily frustrated with the process, both because of her still developing fine-motor skills and because some of the videos she finds are just really treacherous. Like, when I try to help her, I get confused, too. And I have pretty good spatial reasoning skills. 

Her frustration leads to anger. Which leads to gut-wrenching shrieks that make you wonder whether someone’s being brutally stabbed to death in the other room or whether Tess is just having trouble aligning some of the corners of her origami owl.

Serenity now.

She stomped her feet and tossed her head back. 

“Mom!” she wailed. 

No answer. 

Because I was in the bathroom and since none of my kids were in peril, I felt like I deserved two minutes to myself. Maybe even three.

By the time I emerged, she was in a full-blown tantrum that she couldn’t back down from.

“What is it, Tess?”

But she was already sulking. She had tossed her crumpled origami attempt onto the floor and  flipped the tablet upside down, irrationally enraged at the faceless fingers that were folding with ease on the screen. 

She stared straight ahead in a heated rage, arms crossed across her chest, refusing to look at me or respond in any way.

“Can I help you?”

Silence.

“If you use your words to tell me what the problem is, I can try to help you.”

More silence. 

“If you just cry and whine and just say “Mom!” over and over again, I don’t know what the issue is.”

WIth theatrical force, she shoved the tablet across the table, stood up, and stomped up the steps to her room to reset. 

Which doesn’t totally solve the problem, but it helps me in the short-term. The boys were all up on the third floor and Tess was sequestered in her room. 

True serenity, right now.

At one o’clock, Tighe had an important conference call, so we needed relative quiet in the house. Which means only one thing: screen time. 

Tess and Lou watched the most recent animated Addams family movie, which is a lot less nightmare-inducing than the new Wednesday series they were watching on Netflix. Though they LOVED that. 

Nate, Sam, and two friends went to hide out in the basement so they could play video games and collectively procrastinate Nate’s homework assignment from the night before. 

And that bought me some more serenity until about 3pm when there was a sudden, yet urgent, run on snacks. At which point Tess and Lou asked to do dinosaur mad libs—an activity which, for some reason, generates a lot of giggling and shrieking and obscenities from Lou. Some of them aren’t even real obscenities, they’re just nonsense words that he bellows out in a tourettes-like frenzy. 

By the end of the day, I counted no fewer than 17 fruit snacks wrappers and 12 empty Cheez-it bags on the top of the trashcan. How do they survive an entire day at school without that steady drip of snacks? 

So we survived another day, another snow day at that. But will we survive Tess’s birthday party tomorrow afternoon? Stay tuned…