Friday's Tattler

Sorry about missing Friday - but a truck came by and took my line down, so I was without Internet service until today.

I hope all of you who are reading have power back and are enjoying some kind of normalcy. It's been a bit wild here. Molly and Rob lost power and came to spend one night. It was wonderful for me, and I enjoyed every minute of it. The boys were absolutely delightful. I've never seen better behaved children. Robbie took a nap in my arms. I was enchanted by his dozing off. He snuggled in with me and passed out for about 1.5 hours. I was in heaven. We had chicken pot pie for dinner, and we ate the whole thing! When it was time to go to bed, the three of them climbed the stairs, got into bed together and were asleep in five minutes. They slept until 7:30 the next morning and they got up to a bowl of cereal and some serious playing. We played down at the school in the snow. They each had a tall pair of boots so we were able to trudge along through the ruts on the road and the kids discovered the long ice sickles hanging from everything. It was fun.

We have fared well here. We were iced in for two days and could not get out. We had a power line down in the drive. We had power, however, and felt really lucky. The cat disappeared during the ice storm and didn't surface until after the snow fell. I would have enjoyed the storm a lot more if the cat had been home. Right now, I'm listening to ice falling from the trees. We lost a good sized tree which landed about three feet from where we were standing. It was a bit daunting, but no real damage done. The 65 foot tree will have to come down. Not sure how I feel about that since I planted it.

Edith took Amy and her family in for several days. Today, Amy has power and I am sure she is pleased to be back to normal, although I think everyone had a good time at Edith's.

I've been making a postage stamp quilt and I was able to work a lot on that this week. I baked a lot and tried to stay warm in my freezing house.

I've also worked on the summer program - (yes, ice or snow, it's that time to start thinking ahead). We will be sending a questionnaire home this week. Please fill it out and return it to a teacher. We need to know how many of our present students will be with us for the summer, how many siblings you want to add, and how you want to pay for it. We need to have a ceiling number to plan field trips and swimming.

Every January the phone begins to ring with people wanting spots at the GS. This year has been no exception. We have enrolled two new children and we expect another new child next week. This all works out in the wash if we enroll one new child a week. But we are nearly at capacity now, so that has to stop someplace along the line. We will be hiring another person to insure a good staff ratio of adults to children.

We hope this week's challenges were not too hard. We will see you all on Monday.