Why do I bother leaving the house?

What have we been up to today, you ask? I wish I had something exciting to share with you, but like most weekends we haven't amounted to much this weekend. Though, truthfully, we amounted to more than we do during a lot of our weekends.

We find it really challenging here finding things to do during the weekend with the kids. We've finally freed ourselves from Brandon's morning nap only to find that he'll fall asleep in the car if we attempt to do anything, therefore screwing the afternoon nap. Kyle and Natalie have entered a particularly amusing phase where they each torment each other incessantly from the safety of their carseats in the third row of the TrailBlazer. This means we can hear them squealing at, screaming at, and taunting each other, but we can't reach them to effectively threaten them. Any time we go somewhere Kyle complains the entire time that he wants to go home, and when we finally leave Natalie throws a fit because she doesn't want to go home. Brandon keeps his opinions to himself, therefore reinforcing his position of Favorite Child.

All of the above doesn't surprise me, and it wouldn't really even daunt me if I hadn't had to spend 20 minutes trying to talk the kids into leaving the house instead of watching Toopy & Binoo, only to give up and let them watch Toopy & Binoo before we could leave the house in the first place. And then we spent 10 minutes bundling everyone up into their winter coats and shoes because 42F might be warm by our recent standards, but when we're standing outside in the wind it feels fairly Arctic.

Add to this the fact that there are very few entertainment options in a city the size of St. John's when it's cold, snow is covering every surface--including sidewalks, and I'm not an 'outdoor person', and you see why it might be easier to just stay home.

I heard a rumor this morning that the pack ice was visible from Signal Hill, so we loaded the kids into the car and drove up there, and the view really was beautiful. (I had to look up 'pack ice' on Wikipedia first, and in case you're as clueless as I was here's what they say about pack ice: Drift ice is ice that floats on the surface of the water in cold regions, as opposed to fast ice, which is attached to a shore. Usually drift ice is carried along by winds and sea currents, hence its name, "drift ice". When the drift ice is driven together into a large single mass, it is called pack ice.) Beautiful enough to even make all the coats and arguing worth the trouble. The sun was shining, the wind wasn't quite gale-force, and the ocean was endless. The amount of ice was impressive. But I'm really looking forward to summer and warmer weather so that when the kids are complaining the cold can't be one more thing they're complaining about and at least the 10 minutes of coat-layering can be removed from our pre-outing ordeal.