Chilly

Mabel is eating a piece of frozen bread and complaining that it's cold. She won't let me defrost it or toast it though, so I can't really help her.

(We keep our bread in the freezer, mostly for space reasons. As we generally make toast, it doesn't matter to us, and we never have to worry about it going off. But it means that our children are slow to associate the word bread with the sliced stuff, and when Mabel asks for a piece of toast, I have to make sure to find out whether she wants it toasted or frozen. Pointing out that it's not toast if it's frozen does nothing to convince her.)

Geese are flying overhead, big flocks of them up from the lake spreading themselves across the sky. They've finally packed their little feathered suitcases and are heading for Florida. The temperature today is hitting a high of 32 F (or 0 C, which is freezing in both languages) for pretty much the first time this winter, and my fingers don't like it. If my fingernails weren't silver, you'd be able to see that my fingertips are a delicate shade of palest purple. A tiny flurry of snowflakes is whirling outside, and we will be driving the half-mile to pick Dash up from school.

It's all well and good to be cosy and warm inside while the winter wind howls, but when the winter wind makes the drainpipe outside your bedroom window vibrate in some unidentifiable way that sounds unpleasantly like a pneumatic drill at random intervals all night, things are less like snug as a bug and more like Night of the Living Dead. This is what was happening two nights ago outside Mabel's room, which just happens to be on the windward corner of the house and as inaccessible as possible by ladder or leaning out a window. I decamped to my bedroom leaving a soundly sleeping Mabel behind. She woke up three minutes later. I went back and got her, but she spent the next hour and a half flipping from one side to the other as she didn't nurse back to sleep, before she finally did.

Must be time for a cuppa. Should be warmer tomorrow. Maybe the geese will turn around.