It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas, Er...Alaska?

Before I tell you about our winter wonderland this weekend, I wanted to share this with you. Sharon (our ShiShi, as Marino calls her), the director of Marino's daycare, was nice enough to send me this picture of Marino being traumatized by the site of Santa at daycare. Seriously, does this kid look terrified or what?

On Friday, talks of a snow storm began. I grew up in upstate New York, so I am definately one of those smug winter weather people who think everyone south of the Mason Dixon line is a complete lightweight hysteric when it comes to snow. This is totally unrelated to this blog, but I wanted to share that when I lived in Atlanta, they would close school when it got too cold. True story. No snow, no rain, it was just too cold to go to school!! Ha! When I was growing up, school wasn't closed for anything less than 10 inches of snow. And it could be -5 and we were still outside waiting for the bus!

Ok, back to the topic...all that is to say I really didn't think we were getting a lot of snow. Little did I know we would end up with 20 inches of snow! I kept telling Marino that he was witnessing history and would likely never see this much snow in one day ever again, but he wasn't really impressed.

Evan took him out for a few minutes on Saturday, although we had no snow pants and no sled, so we were fairly unprepared (we did have snow boots, at least). That was another thing about upstate New York...not only was there an abundance of winter weather gear, but things didn't "sell out" like they do here (as evidenced by the fact I asked my parents to look for snow pants and a sled in within a few hours, both had been located in upstate NY). Living in metropolitan area as a parent means you need to think of things way in advance. And buy snow pants sooner before the night of the Blizzard of 2009 (and buy tickets for the Nutcracker Tiny Tots puppet show at Glen Echo sooner than 3 weeks in advance, apparently). Anyway, we only took him out for a few minutes (in 3 pairs of pants). He tried to walk and immediately fell face first in the snow, so it was a rough start, but he had fun after that. Evan burried him a little and he was "swimming" in the snow. And eating it.

And since it was a snowy day, what better to do than nap with your favorite boy?

It ended up snowing so much, we had to shovel ourselves out of the house!

On Sunday, we were finally able to leave the house again. Marino and I went to visit my friend Robyn and her son Ryan (who is 2 months older than Marino). Can I just say that Marino was a terror? He kept taking Ryan's toys and saying "MINE" (I mean, this happened about 27 times), he wouldn't share his goldfish crackers and then started screaming "FISHY!!!!!!!!!!" at me even though I was giving him the goldfish. Ugh. I am so clueless in regards to disciplining a toddler, so if anyone has any advice in this regard, please send it my way. Poor Ryan was so sweet! There were some good moments in there, too, but Marino was unusually agressive. This continued even after we got home, when he threw his night bottle at me and refused to go to sleep. I even have a scratch on my nose from him clawing my face in anger! I am slightly nervous about our trip to New York (we leave Wednesday night), just because he is already seeming especially rebellious...I'm not sure how he will react to major changes in his routine. Wish us luck!!

Here's some pictures when Marino was behaving normally!