New carpet!

My preference would be to live farther south because I am not a fan of cold weather, but I don't have any say in the matter. Although I am not a fan of snow, it is fun to see the kids get excited about making a snow man, sledding, throwing snow balls, making snow angels, etc. The snow we got yesterday was an excellent packing snow. They played in the snow yesterday morning, and this afternoon they spent a few hours outside in the snow. It snowed again some this evening, and it made the drive to take Nadia to basketball a bit slippery, and I again was wishing I lived somewhere farther south, but I am thankful we made it there and back safely. I am a chicken when it comes to driving in the snow and ice.

Yesterday was a very exciting day for all three kids because of the snow and for Ian in particular because it was his birthday. Today was a very exciting day for me because we got new flooring. I replaced all or almost all of the flooring in the first two houses we owned, but I didn't change any in this house until today, which meant it had been 12.5 years since I had gone shopping for flooring. For whatever reason I found it much harder to decide this time around. I started shopping for flooring in the spring, and today they started installing it. We now have blue carpet in the family room (was an off-white berber carpet before), and the kitchen went from linoleum to luxury vinyl tile.

Tomorrow they're going to do the grout work in the kitchen, fix one end of the dining room carpet that has come up and is getting frayed (at no charge), and measure Nadia's room as we might get her purple carpet for her bedroom. When we bought the house all of the flooring (except for the living room that has hardwood) was off-white, so it definitely looks different having light blue carpet in the family room. Hopefully Paul will like it when he comes home on Thursday. Since I usually spend most of my day in the kitchen and family room, it felt really strange to stay out of those two rooms for six hours today.

I was really excited today about something else - the arrival of my new camera. Amazon said it would arrive by 8pm today, but it didn't. It says that it arrived in Williamsport (25 minutes from our house) at 5:29am and left there in the delivery truck at 7:21am, but then it ended up back in Williamsport at 8:52pm. Maybe it will come tomorrow.

When Paul was in graduate school he traveled to conferences in places like Italy, Poland, and Canada. I remember when he was gone I *really* missed him and found it exhausting to temporarily be a single parent. The upside to the fact he has worked very long hours over the past seven months (plus has a two hour round trip commute to work 6-7 days a week) is that I have adjusted to the role of taking care of the kids on my own six days a week, and when he's away on a trip (New York last month and Virginia right now) I don't really notice his absence except on Wednesday night because that's the one time each week I rely on him to help me by taking the kids to AWANA.