Leaving the House

Whenever I think about it, I'm still in awe over how poorly we fared during the recent snow. I had no idea things were going to be as bad as they were. Whereas in the past, we've never missed more than one or two days for snow in a row, this time we missed five straight days which was unheard of.

Saturday was the first time I had left the house in a week. I was never so pathetically grateful to go to a baby shower in my life. Yesterday we went to the grocery and even though the temps had been above freezing for two days, there was till a ton of ice in turning lanes or anywhere where there was abundant shade. Today we're out of school again for MLK day and they'd better get out there and scrape the bus turning lanes because we went by some schools yesterday that would still be considered inaccessible!

The big news here now is on the boy's front. Saturday night we went to watch football at a friend's house and the couple was so, so, so kind enough to give the boy all of their teenage son's old legos...however, the weren't legos, but the Mega Blocks Dragon sets....a LOT of sets. We took home one large wooden box and another monster tub full of broken down sets. Luckily, they had all of the instruction books with them. It took me 6.5 hours yesterday. Yes, 6.5 hours to put all of the sets together, and amazingly we were only missing 4 pieces. Two we were able to borrow from the real Legos we have and that left only two major pieces missing which wasn't a bad deal at all. Here's what we have:

This castle was the first an most difficult of all we built. Things got easier as we had fewer pieces to dig through.
I suppose this is an outpost of some sort...

The ship that almost killed me.

And finally the bad guy's stronghold.

My thumbs are blistered, my hip hurts from sitting on the floor and I'm generally stiff this morning, but once we got the red castle together I wasn't going to stop since I'd never hear the end of the prodding until we'd finished everything. The stuff certainly isn't Lego quality - the pieces don't always snap nicely together and I'm sure more of it's going to fall apart easily than not, but it was so nice and generous for them to give the sets to the boy. They came with a bunch of people and all of those dragons also. The boy couldn't be happier.

However, I'm realizing we're slowly losing our house to toys. The dining room table is already Lego Land and now these have occupied the front room since there's no furniture in there and they take up so much floor space because if they were in the play room, they'd be busted in seconds. I told the boy I'd earned a day of reading and respite and if I ever hear the sentence, "I'm bored" for the next several weeks I'm going to have an apoplexy.

The morning comes early...and thank goodness that means school for all of us. Sweet ice free, dragon slaying dreams.