Where did my snow day go? Today was kind of a zero sum game. The snow fell for most of the day, but now it is raining cats and dogs, washing away most of what we got today and what has lingered since last weekend. Yuck. I'm a snow fiend, and this just eats me up! Tomorrow we are expected to get some more snow, but not nearly as much as the one to two feet just a bit above us. I'm jealous. It seems like wherever I move, the snow moves elsewhere. When I lived in Northern Virginia, not a single flake of snow seemed to ever fall. Though I suppose I can't complain--we've had more snow this winter so far than ever before, including the amazing white Christmas.

I've been a fan of the snow, for reasons I won't go into here. I like the enforced break. I like being stuck in the house. I like the ready excuse not to be overly social (though I've spent way too much time on the phone!). I'm happy to see some activities get cancelled, if only to allow us to catch our breath and get reenergized. And yet not everything has been on break. We've been able to keep up with our music lessons, with dive practice, and Latin class. Two dance classes were still on. But school was out on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, and Thursday was a 2-hours-late day. We had no RES, no SpongeBob School, two days of lost dance class. In the meantime, though, we've still stayed plenty busy.

The big drama of the early part of the week was the Big Vomit. Anyone who knows me know that I am a Class I emetophobe. My irrational, pathological fear of throwing up can rule my life, especially in the winter months. Rutledge had been coughing for about two weeks, but it waxed and waned, being bad enough to keep him out of school, then better again. He was fine all weekend and had been playing outside nonstop for two days. Monday night, he developed an especially nasty, wet cough, and he could barely control it. On Tuesday morning, I warned my friend Rebecca that he was coughing a lot, but she said to just come over anyway, and she had some Delsym (I was out of it and had been giving him either Benadryl or Mucinex). We had a great day moving furniture at her house (we're totally Lucy and Ethel) and her family room looks so awesome now that I'm jealous of all the open space. When I put Rutledge into the car, he started coughing from the jolt of cold air. He had been a coughing disaster on the way over as well, but it calmed down once he was indoors and had the medicine. Well, we hadn't even turned out of her neighborhood when he went into a huge coughing fit and started vomiting what sounded like gallons. He had been eating fistful after fistful of Goldfish crackers from the multi-pound box while we were there, and he was clearly well hydrated. And it smelled so awful! I probably could have handled the 20 or so minutes home if it hadn't smelled so rancid, but it absolutely turned my stomach. I don't know if I'm a sympathy puker or not because I never stick around long enough to find out (usually I've already flown the coop long and nearly levitated out of the room, house, state, country...) or I go dashing the second it happens. And I'm not a stranger to vomit in a vehicle, alas, either. But this was so high volume, and the smell was sucked right up to my front windows, which I had to open. Snow was piled up all along the edges of the road, so I couldn't pull over as I felt myself starting to retch. It was all I could do to get to the first open driveway, a post office, where I pulled the van to a stop right in the exit and got out and went into my panicked "rescue breathing" to try not to lose my own lunch. Poor Rutledge was sitting there in the freezing cold in his soaking wet, stinky clothes for about 20 minutes while I tried to figure out exactly what to do because every time I set foot anywhere near the van, the bile would rise in my throat again. Kerry was on his way, but it was going to take him at least 20 minutes, and the roads were rather icy because they had not been plowed well in the neighborhoods. Rebecca came back and saved us by taking us back to her house in her van (poor Rutty had to be stripped naked, though, and had to ride that way). He got bathed there, got some fresh clothes, and Kerry and I were able to go back to rescue my van from the post office. He brought Lysol and bleach spray, so we disinfected as well as we could in the dark, in the rain, at the post office. It got clean enough that I could drive it home, where I could continue the cleaning process. My phobia is tied to me throwing up, not so much other people. I still can't really be anywhere near anyone vomiting, but my biggest fear is that I'm going to do it, so even though I knew that what happened to Rutledge wasn't contagious to me or others (we wouldn't cough ourselves silly if we did get his cough...), it still made me feel sick. All in all, these incidents are embarrassing, and I always wish that I could somehow cope better and not go into a freakish panic attack. But that's who I am. We all have our things, I suppose.

The next morning, I took Rutledge to the doctor, and she said that he was having bronchial spasms, and that's why medicine like Delsym, which tells the brain to shut down the coughing spot, is not the most effective treatment. He had a breathing treatment in the office and has been using the cutest albuterol inhaler with a fish mouth mask on it. He loves puffing into the fishmouth, and it worked a minor miracle. No coughing at all, really, since he started it. It truly turned off the problem like a switch. I wish everything could be that easy.

The real reason why I've slacked about blogging this week is that I'm addicted to Ticket to Ride. I started playing online after we resurrected the game a week or so ago, and I positively cannot stop playing. I think I'm going to play only a game or two, and the next thing I know it's 2 a.m. The only thing that manages to stop me is that the Java applets go haywire now and then and the site malfunctions and I have to reboot my whole computer, and sometimes that process is enough to stop me long enough so that I get interested in something else for a while. But I've been staying up way too late. The kids now have an account, so Ollie and I have been playing online from across the room. I am always the winner, and I'm proud of my strategies. Tonight I added in the Europe version, and that is much more challenging for me. I still prefer my U.S. cities, which I'm comfortable with. But I'll get used to the new rules and map, I suppose.

We've been reading a lot this week. We finished "Strawberry Girl," which is a Newbery winner that isn't a popular now. The boys and I are reading "The Dead and the Gone" still, though I'm turning that over to them since it's long. All three of the older kids are listening to "Understood Betsy" right now, which is very cute. It's going rather fast, which I like, and it is in the same basic genre that Frances enjoys--episodic old-fashioned girl stories. I feel like we read something else, but I can't remember what. The question of the day on a large statewide homeschooling list is what people do about snow days. It's been a mixed bag for us. On the one hand, their public schooled friends are home and around, and I want them to have time with them. Hence two nights in a row of sleepovers for Frances and a sleepover for Walter and Ollie. Monday was totally a day off, but by Tuesday I wanted them to at least do math and grammar. It's been a halfway week, I guess you'd say--some work done, more reading accomplished than usual, but less studying type stuff. I suppose I've been counting a bit on having a reprieve on Monday, but our crappy snow right now probably means regular stuff is going to resume, and we may not be ready.

Ticket to Ride is calling my name again...