Snowed in and out

This week has seen the winter weather taking a grip of England. Archaeologist Husband has continued to work at home whereas I have driven through the white dusted landscape in the countryside from one village to another. I had to postpone my library and admin day at Cambridge due to the heavy snow fall, but the Finnish School was on on Saturday as normal – although most of the non-Leicester members stayed away. Now I am reading the weather forecasts with an interpretative eye and assessing, if I manage to drive around properly in the coming days. It is getting warmer, but more snow has been forecast.

Number One Son has been delighted of snow. At weekends when he sees snow falling, he wants to go out and make snow balls. He has not quite grasped the principles behind the right climate conditions for making snow balls, but he is slowly realising that snow gets everywhere and zero temperature results with damp mittens. And he is slowly gathering that the damp mittens become cold mittens and cold hands. His insistence of going down the helter-skelter in the park, although I told him it was wet, stopped when he realised that it WAS wet. He is grasping the ideas of observation and causality. In the same way he stopped refusing to put the new slippers on in the nursery, when he observed that the old indoor shoes were too small and he could not put them on himself. The lights are starting to come properly on upstairs and he is making his own observations and practical conclusions of the wider world.

One Finnish mother living in England was wondering why the other English mothers are not taking their children in the park any more. She has only seen some Polish and Baltic mothers. I have also noticed that when Number One Son happily runs around making snowballs, there are practically no other children around - just some teenagers playing with their snowboards and adult dog walkers. Some parents pass by with their children with sledges – either they are going to the shop or one of the nearby slopes to sledge. Naturally, it is easy for Number One Son to go out, since he has a Finnish outdoors winter outfit and winter boots. I keep fingers crossed that the slightly tight boots will fit until the end of the cold spell. After the mild winters of the noughties, the current decade seems to have seen the return of the proper winters and one has to plan for next winter’s proper clothing.