The Monster doesn’t quite grasp the idea of “winter”, I’m learning quickly.

I mean, okay, yes, he can recite the seasons and he can tell you what the weather is (usually).  But getting that snow means we can’t get out?  Not so much.

So we got pounded by the blizzard – almost 30 inches of snow at the airport, according to them.  I measure something like two feet in our yard, but… two feet, thirty inches, not a lot of difference there.  Either way, it meant one thing: we were snowed in.

It could be worse.  There are areas around us where they’re not promising plowing for a few days, and Baltimore City supposedly talks about having 75% of the residential streets cleared within 60 hours.  (We’ll see.)  But in the interim, it leaves us with a child who’s shrieking for going out in the car and melting down when we say no.  (And believe me, continuous shrieks of “CAR! CAR! CAR!” get on your nerves after about, oh, half an hour.)

At least yesterday, we were able to get out into the yard once the snow stopped falling, and they could play outside for an hour.  (They both seemed to enjoy that very much.)  It was worse during the storm itself, mind you, with the fact that we couldn’t do anything with them that would placate him at all – I wasn’t about, regardless of how tempting it was, to let the Monster go out into the weather just to make my point to him that it wasn’t something he wanted to be doing.  (It was bad enough that I was going out every few hours to shovel, to try to keep ahead of everything so that it’d not be so rough to get the walk shoveled after the storm.)

But now, it’s more the stir-crazy, “I want to go to school” kind of insanity around the house, after he’s been home since Thursday with very little to do, and none of his normal routine…