Working through a snow day

I love winter. Love, love, love, love, love it! Chilly temps, snow, slush, wind chill.

Bring it on!

Fall will always be my favorite season, but winter is a very close second. Winter brings hearty foods like pot roast and chicken noodle soup. A day spent baking is cozy, warm and leaves the house full of delicious scents.

I love layering on clothing. Winter is a lot friendlier to the good, old mom body than summer. You can always add more clothing if you're chilly, but there are limits to how much you can take off when the thermometer is pegging 90 in the shade. I love snuggling up on the couch by the fire with a good book or a TV marathon session.

Bizarrely, my favorite sport, swimming, is a winter sport around here, so, no matter what the weather is outside, we still get to play in our bathing suits, and the temperature is usually hovering in the very humid 80s. Hmm. Maybe I actually like winter more than fall, now that I think about it.

Winter also means trying to juggle the dreaded snow day. When we were 8, we all lived for snow days, especially if we were supposed to have a math test that day.

Snow days are fantastic when you're 8, but when you're a working parent who now has to scramble to find child care or take an emergency vacation or sick day to stay home with the kiddos, they can be a real pain.

Right now, I'm very lucky in that we have grandparents close by who don't mind helping out with a snow day, or I can usually manage to telecommute for a few hours if travel conditions are truly awful. That means bribing everyone with TV and snacks and crossing my fingers that everyone will stay quiet so that I can get through an hour conference call without interruption. It's a guarantee that the minute I hit the "unmute" button, someone will come barging into the home office crying because they didn't get any green M&M's, or announcing that they have to use the bathroom. Since everyone else on the line is probably thanking their stars that it wasn't their kid this time, I've learned to just grin and bear it.

Of course, trying to work from home means that everyone needs to stay in the house while I work, and they can't be out traipsing through the snow until I'm finished. It takes about nine times longer to finish my work when people keep interrupting me to see if I'm finished with my work yet. So we try to balance it, an hour of work, an hour of snow playing.

The kids are still at that age where they need some help getting bundled into their outdoor gear. Let's say that if I don't want them coming home with frostbite, they need some help getting bundled, because if left to their own devices, they'd be outside in their underwear in no time flat.

By the time everyone is bundled and ready to go out, I've gotten three more phone calls and 14 emails that all need to be answered right away. So they sweat it out, while I deal with work, and then we go out for about five minutes, at which time at least one of them will decide that they have to pee. We repeat this cycle for the next eight hours. Snow days, I could do without.

As an adult, I've discovered the joy of what we now call Snow Nights. Snow nights are the best. Snow nights are when you get through your work day, and the kids get through their school day, maybe with the help of an early dismissal, and then all activities for the evening are canceled. Once everyone is home safely, there is nothing left to do but get homework done as quickly as possible and enjoy the rest of the night. I try to get dinner in a pot cooking while this is happening, so that we are all ready to go out and play in the snow as soon as we can.

After we exhaust ourselves with snow play, we come back inside to a hot dinner, and then all cuddle up to watch a movie or play a board game, or maybe even both, because we have all night to do what we want! Snow nights are also great nights to try out new cookie recipes or bake up a batch of brownies. Since the weather is terrible, there is no urgency to try to get some errands run or catch up on work. It will all still be there tomorrow, along with piles of snow that will have to be moved before we can head back out to work and school.

If we are lucky, we get to extend our snow night with a two-hour delay. The best two-hour delays are the ones that are called in the night before, so we know we get to sleep in a little and can stay up a little later.

Two-hour delays are perfect, because the kids still get most of the day in and don't have to make it up later in the year.

I can still get to work for the day, and best of all, we get to wake up to a snowy, sparkly, magical, winter wonderland.

Dear winter, I'm so glad you're finally here!

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.