School's Out!

I woke up this morning to the most fabulous news every child could ever hope to hear. School is cancelled. I'm not even in school, and I could feel the thrill of the news send chills through my body. When Anna yelled to her Dad to find out if it was time to get up yet, I responded that she didn't have to get up because she didn't have school. Wahoo!!! Unfortunately, my daughter has an internal clock without a snooze button. She was up promptly at 6:45, ready to eat cinnamon rolls with her Dad before he left for work. Elizabeth (the one who takes after me) slept in until almost 8:00, bless her heart and her internal snooze button.

After breakfast, Anna wanted to do what every kid staying home from school wants to do - watch all the TV that is on while she is at school. Because she was sure that "day TV" had some great undiscovered secret that she has been missing this whole school year. Sorry, if you aren't into Barney, completely implausible, semi-incestuous, bizarre relationships (soap operas), and poorly filmed courtroom brawls between angry toothless men and women, there is no great secret. To start off her big day of TV, she turned on . . . Sesame Street (no, we don't have cable). I gave in and let her watch it, partly because I was laughing almost to the point of bathroom break time. I mean, she has never liked Sesame Street. In fact, she has previously hated it, crying if it was ever on. It was babyish two years ago. But now it has the benefit of being unknown and mysterious. She was trying hard to look very entertained, because you know that it is so much cooler if you are missing school to do it. She actually enjoyed the following, which I find disturbing for a number of reasons. Watch on, if you can stand more than a minute of it. Make sure you see the lamb attack Murray.



So, I really do find this disturbing. Who taught Murray how to rap? And why didn't he invest his efforts instead into getting that horrible underbite fixed? What I truly find interesting is that Murray (who only speaks English) and the lamb (who only speaks Spanish) spend all of their time together, and yet Murray knows less Spanish than I do (10 words). What is keeping this friendship alive? Clearly they use each other to fulfill their needs - Murray needs to say he has a friend, because let's face it, he doesn't exactly hang with the Big Bird crowd. The abusive lamb doesn't care that Murray won't learn Spanish so he can communicate with her, she just wants him to hang around so she can randomly beat him with karate belts. It is so sad.

So here we are; Sesame Street is over and now we are just trying to survive our "Winter weather storm advisory red alert day." I think that the weatherman may have made a mistake (see picture). Today is more like a "drizzling weather, but you live in Virginia, not Arizona, for Heaven's sake, so what is everyone freaking out about? day." Please, I grew up in Montana. I only ever had 1 snow day in 15 years. That's right. ONE. And that was because we had sub-zero temperatures with snow drifts and ice so high that they couldn't get any plows through. Now that is a snow day.