Winter Bomb

Winter Bomb, Bomb Cyclone, and Cyclone Storm were common terms in the weather reports this past winter. The worst one came on Feb 24. It was also is the worst storm we've seen during the 6 winters we lived in Minnesota. Oofta!!

Before the storm arrived, we managed to take the family cross country skiing at the Hormel Nature Center on Sat Feb 23. It's a good thing we made it because the Winter Bomb made the trails inaccessible for awhile afterward. This became our one ski trip of the winter, and it was Leighsa's first time ever! We all did really well. Even Jeremy, who had a really hard time staying up before, got the hang of it this time on the open meadow trails. The boys, as in the past, sailed away only after a couple falls getting on the trail.

When we got to the forest, Tanner wanted to go down a sledding hill on his skis. Dallin tried too, but neither of them were very succesful. When we were good and tired, we made our way back to the lodge, and although the boys were pretty whiny at this point, I was so glad we got back in one piece! 

That night, the bomb arrived. The next day, it exploded. And the following night, it hung out for more fun. Luckily, it did not entail -55 and -65 degree windchill like the storm in January (that we missed by being in PR). This was a more bearable temperature of -20 and -30 degrees. Instead, it was the snowfall and snow drifts that made this storm insane!

Wind gusts were 55+ mph, and snowfall was 10-14 inches in our area. The wind made white-out conditions for hours on end. Toward the last part of the storm, the winds formed enormous snowbanks on the highways and around homes and buildings that were 5 to 8 feet deep. Church was canceled. All highways in the entire region, including the big interstates, were closed for more than 24 hours, and some were closed for several days. School was canceled Monday and I think Tuesday, too. Some of our friends were buried in their homes by the snow and another friend had to get helpers to shovel their roof, which was damaged from the weight of the snow. We were fortunate to only have the big drift at the front door, which was an easy climb out. This one was 4.5 - 5 feet deep from the walk way. We got a huge drift by the backyard fence that was 6 feet tall, making it really easy to roll over the fence into the neighbor's yard.

Backyard drifts.

Drift at the garage entrance on Sunday midday. Tanner tried to explore a little bit on the driveway, but the wind was still raging, so he didn't stay out there more than a minute or two.

Jeremy went out to snow blow on Sunday evening when things calmed down a litle. But it was still snowing and still frigid winds. I begged him not to waste his time. He really wanted to get the toughest work out of the way so he could get out to work before ten oclock on Monday. (Unfortunately, Hormel does not close down for winter bombs). 

The snow bank grew during the night.

Well, by the following morning (Monday), the wind had blown snow back onto the driveway, with a huge drift down by the curb. Jeremy snow blowed the whole driveway again and worked another hour on the entrance to the road. A day or two later, he had to dig out the mailbox, which took an hour. And then about a week or so later, he tackled the rest of the entrance to the driveway, which took about 2 hours. Each time he tried to get through anything at the curb, it required using a garden shovel to hack at the 5 and 6 foot icy piles to loosen them up. Then with the snowblower, he would plow at the looser piles he created.  These pictures don't give his work any justice. You really can't understand the magnitude of how much snow we were dealing with unless you were standing in it trying to get it out of the way.

You can see how Jeremy had to carve through about 2 feet of snow from the edge of the road that was shoveled to the actual edge of the road to where our mailbox was. And yes, the mailman refused to deliver our mail until we uncovered the mailbox.

The boys had fun exploring the storm's effects. 

I got out and had some fun, too. I felt rediculous trying to walk up and down the snow drifts because no matter how hard you try, you get stuck in unexpected places and the unsure footing makes you feel like the earth is moving!

On our snow day home from school, we built another pirate ship in our living room. The yellow couch was already moved in here with the brown couches to make more room for my music studio, so we had an extra large ship! I was the princes and the boys were the bad pirates that kidnapped me and held me ransom for the King's jewels.

Later in the week at one of my teaching jobs, I watched a school bus try to turn a corner. It just couldn't make it around the snow banks. The left bank got wedged up under the middle of the bus so they couldn't move. I thought it was crazy how the bank on the right is as tall as the school bus.

This was taken a couple days after the storm to show the canyon that leads to our front door.

Here'st the boys waiting for the school bus that week. The bus couldn't see the boys because the snow banks were too high, so they watched and waitied at the top of these hills. I took these pictures from my car in the road because most days that I substituted, I had to be ready to leave for work as soon as these kiddos were getting on the bus.

While this was the worst storm we've seen, there was more snow to come. Stay tuned!

Back to Business

Getting back to business in Minnesota after our 5 week trip in Puerto Rico was a unique learning experience.

We got home late on Wednesday Feb 13 and stayed home from school on Thursday Feb 14 to recover from our long day of traveling. We assumed the biggest adjustment would be the weather. But there were several other things that surprised us before that. First, we were startled by the silence in our house at nighttime. Obviously there were no coqui frogs or jungle crickets to sing us to sleep, but we didn't think we had become so accustomed to those sounds. The silence was truly deafening. (the experience reminded me of feeling that way coming back from Thailand, which I completely forgot about). Luckily, while we were in PR, we recorded the nighttime sounds for us to listen to at night in our quiet house. 

Next we were surprised by the space everywhere in our house. Just tons of rooms and unused space! I felt like a fish out of water- or rather a fish that had been taken from a pond to a huge ocean. I knew our home was too big, but coming back from Vereda del Mar confirmed that our house is WAY too big for our needs.  

And finally, we were surprised by all of our stuff! The boys took a tour of the house to say hello to everything. We had completely forgotten about many of their toys, books, and furniture. It was kind of like Christmas morning for them to find everything again. Honeslty, it was a little overwhelming for me to see all our stuff again. I found myself thinking, "We have 4 cooking pans? And enough plates to feed 40 people at one time? Is this stuff really necessary?" And "When have we ever used all 4 of our couches at one time?" It just all seemed so excessive. The only item I found that I had truly missed was the piano. The boys were also excited to play again and plunked away for much of the afternoon. That night, we ate an early dinner and went to bed before 7pm. We didn't do anything specifically for Valentines day, except our usual cuddles and hugs. 

(I think my grey hair looks SO cool!)

The next morning was Friday, and we woke up at 4:30 am! The two-hour time difference really affected us. The boys were ready for a nap by the time the bus came to pick them up for school at 7:45, but they had a BLAST seeing all their friends and teachers again. (Fun fact, we emailed back and forth with each of their classes while we were gone). The boys came home with a big bag of goodies that their classes filled for them during their Valentine party the day before. We were so grateful that their classmates thought of our boys despite our long absence. 

We all enjoyed the weekend recovering. It was good the boys had the weekend to rest from their first long day back at school. I could tell it was a lot faster paced then what we had grown accustomed to. Jet lag wore off by the end of the first week, but it took about 3 weeks to finally get our bodies into a normal wake up and bed time routine. 

What about the weather? Everyone was dieing to know how we felt about being back in the cold snow! Yes, this change was the most obvious, but surprisingly, it didn't affect us the way I was dreading! Don't get me wrong, there was tons of snow. In fact, we were greeted in true Minnesota fashion with 6 inches of fresh snow the night we got home. And more storms came every few days until the middle of April, with record breaking snow days and snowfall. Yet, to our surprise, it didn't bother us that much! Tanner and Dallin were very excited to play in the snow and go sledding and build snow forts. And weirdly enough, I was excited to do those things, too.

On Saturday, we took the whole family sledding with Leighsa, Aleighcia and Alainea on Knobb Hill in our neighbhood. We all had a blast! We used our blue sled and some swimming inner tubes. We did a few runs where we hooked all our sleds together to go down the hill in a train. Toward the end, Dallin got tired/hurt, so Jeremy was comforting him in the car when Cici took these pictures. Lots of giggles were had by all!

You can see that I didn't cringe as much as I normally do when going outside to the sub-zero temperatures. It felt like the sunshine from the beach had built a reservoir of warmth inside of me that lasted the rest of the winter. (And actually, my tan lasted that amount of time, too!) I had a lot more energy and patience to withstand the obvnoxious windchills and the icey thick roads. And how could I be cold cuddling with these great friends?

People seemed to notice a visible change in us. Well, of course we were all tanner--and Tanner was brown! But it was more than that. Friends said we looked well rested, happier, and calmer.  Tanner's eyes had stopped doing the stressful blinking that persisted since November. I wasn't as rushed to get everywhere and do everything. Someone told me I glowed! 

Simply put, we didn't have winter gloom. Seasonal depression is real, folks. I felt very fortunate to have missed the worse half of the winter. I could see in many of my friend's eyes that the weather was wearing on them hard. I wish that I could have taken everyone from Austin to PR with me. I believe now more than ever that sunshine is critical for happiness. 

Another comment I got was "SarahLynn, you look so energized!" And I was! I found myself ready for new adventures and ready to get back to the business I love most: teaching children. 

Luckily, I had a cool gig lined up just a few days after we got back. I was able to lead the first graders from Banfield Elementary on a field trip that I created at the Hormel Historic Home. Tanner was one of the kids that got to come! I wasn't sure how he would react to the field trip since he comes to the HHH all the time and since he was here for a different field trip last year with me. But I designed this experience to be different from anything he or his peers had done before. (We piloted this Day in the Life field trip experience last year with previous first graders).

Tanner said he liked it a lot, especially the station where he learned how to make butter and the station where he made his own spinner toy. Tanner said he liked the tour, too, but apparently me dressed up as an Irish housemaid wasn't as impressionable to him, haha. I took the children back in time into the house during the year 1903. I allowed the children to help me find all of young Jay Hormel's teddy bears that he "left" throughout the house, and I taught them things about Jay and his family along the way.  I'm so glad Tanner got to experience this! His class also did a field trip at the library on the same day! He came home with so many experiences to tell us about. All the children sent a cool thank you card to the HHH after the field trip.

 

One day after recently getting back from PR, I was driving home from a meeting and realized that for the first time in years, I had the same amount of energy as I did when I was in college and during my first couple years of teaching. I felt so alive and ready to work! I had new ideas come to me easily. I wasn't allowing the politics of work to hold me back. I wasn't coming home with an empty tank of energy for my family. It was such a great feeling to have myself back. The mindful resting in PR really made an emense change for me and my kids.

Now the challenge was to KEEP doing all the healthy habits we had learned to do. The morning walks on the beach had to be adapted to journeys around the house and walks in the snow. We did cosmic kids yoga every Saturday morning. We did our gospel study about 2-3 times a week during snack or in the evenings. We did our mindfulness lessons and guided relaxations about 3 times a week after our snack. We kept strong at all of this until we made the decision to move. But we are getting back into all of these habits again now that we are settled in our new place. The main point is that we are not letting the healthy activities we learned in PR become strangers to us!

As we got back into our schedules, I tried to ease my way back into things to keep from getting overwhelmed. There were my previous committments that I stuck with, like teaching a family music class at MacPhail on Monday evenings and teaching singing time with the children every Sunday at church. I started spring session with my piano students and enrolled 3 new students.

A fun opportunity came to me when some moms in the community asked me about daytime Mommy and Me Music classes. They really missed the classes I had offered in prior years and wondered if there was any way I could teach a class for them. Since this was something I had missed too, I decided I should take the chance to teach a class at my home.

So I sent out some invites for people to sign up, and within 24 hours I had enough moms to fill two classes. I moved some furniture in my living room to make a music classroom and studio. I taught the class for 7 weeks! As I took this picture, I realized this was finally fulfilling one of my visions that I had when we bought the home- using this space to teach family music classes. 

Turns out the space was not only perfect for the class sizes that I created, it was also perfect for my piano lessons and for various parties that we hosted. It felt great to put our extra square footage to really good use. I also learned more about the perks of being an entrepranuer! From the prep work, to the income, to the lesson activities, to the wonderful mamas and their adorable children, this turned out to be one of my best gigs ever.

As time went on, we got busier. The boys and I would find ourselves more irritable on event-filled days. I could tell that the pace of life was getting to be too much, even though we were just doing school, work and church. I had to be more careful about what we did each day, and had to say no to certain meetings or jobs. I had to be diligent about making time for yoga and all the things that worked so well for us in PR to maintain calm.

Being busy used to be a status that I wore with a badge of honor! And I think as Americans and especially as women, many of us pride in being busy. But my burnout and poor health led me to see things differently, which is one reason I chose to take my family to the Carribean for 35 days. Now, I knew we were a busy family, but I did not fully understand the depth of HOW busy we were until we made the transition back from our trip. I was really struck by the busy-ness that so easily crept over us simply by being back home, even in the small things. The way we shop and drive so hastily, missing the things around us as we go. Our busy way of ordering food at restaurants and even in the way we talk to each other. Everything is fast and cluttered. Cluttered cars, cluttered calendars, cluttered thoughts. Not a lot of room for peace.

Dallin had the toughest time transitioning from calm beach days to activity-filled school days. He came home asleep on the bus every day, which was common all year, but he was so exhausted that he had to nap on the couch for awhile before snack time. This went on for a good 3-4 weeks before he got used to the rigorous schedule. It was actually harder for him to transition back to school at this time than it was for him to start school at the beginning of the year. I think it was because his body had grown accustomed to what is more natural and healthy for us- taking life slowly. 

The full gravity of what being "too busy" meant had finally sunk in. 

I definitely have not arrived at "not being too busy." I don't know if I ever will. But I defintely have a much deeper understanding of what "too busy" actually looks like and why it's worth avoiding. Just another powerful life lesson from Puerto Rico.