Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Ice Storm 2009

With great apologies to my family and friends in truly cold places like Calgary and Chicago, this post is about the "Great Ice Storm of 2009" which really wasn't much of an ice storm. It was predicted to hit hard yesterday but it never quite dropped below freezing so it was just a cold miserable raining 34 degrees most of the day. Once night hit, the temperature finally dropped and the rain switched to sleet and we got a decent covering of ice. Since this is Texas, everything shut down.

I got a call at 5:55 this morning telling me that school was closed and I needed to start the phone tree for the class. Again, why did I agree to be room mom again??? And why didn't someone tell me at the beginning of the year that I was suppose to make a phone tree for weather emergencies? And why was I calling people at 6am to wake them up when they could sleep for another hour and then find out by email or by television? I don't know. I called all the families I could, leaving messages for most of them and waking up a few. I'm sure they were very happy with me. Well, at least their children were.

(I heard that another room mom thought the whole thing was ridiculous. She waited until 7am and only called the families that she didn't know because she figured the ones she knew would be watching television and would figure it out. I'm going her route next time. I didn't get a call from J's class so they didn't even bother!)

The kids were excited to go out and sled. At least this is a good time to test out all the gear we've bought for our spring break ski trip to Canada. Of course, this is Dallas (no hills) and it was almost 9:30 (ice was already melting) by the time they got dressed and went outside. Our poor Texas kids didn't know any better. I found them dragging each other around on the cement driveway in a lid to a big plastic container. Once J hit the small patch of ice that was in the shadow of the gate, he promptly slipped and fell over. That was the end of sledding.

I did take pictures.


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This is ice in Texas.
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