over the last week, temperatures have topped out over 40 degrees. after a month of you’re-gonna-die cold, 40 degrees felt tropical. the snow melted almost completely, and the world looked utterly strange in shades of mud and dead grass.
friday night, though, everything went back to iowa normal. it’s all blinding white and sleds and snowpants again. we went downtown today to play on the ped mall playground, 
where MonkeyBeef insisted to the gods of winter at the top of his lungs that, dammit, a coating of ice was no reason why he shouldn’t be able to climb up the slide anymore! not even EvilGremlin (sadly, the tallest of his brothers at four foot… ummm, well, maybe not even four foot) could make it happen.
i picked his howling butt up off the slide repeatedly and plopped him on the stairs. and forced his body parts through the motions of climbing up the stairs. until he finally quit howling and used the stairs. to climb back down to the bottom of the slide. where he could slip and howl and slip and howl some more.
so then we headed in to a cafe for some cheese pizza by the slice.
went home, i shoveled the driveway and sidewalk while MB napped and the other three cleaned the toy room, dining room, and living room… and then folded laundry! no shit! apparently, i’ve got them so well trained to clean until i say stop that, when they ran out of things to pick up off the floor long before i thought they’d be finished, they didn’t want me to come inside and catch them not cleaning anymore, so they settled on folding the big-ass pile of laundry in the laundry room.
the big-ass pile of dirty laundry. lots of points for intent, a few negative points for execution. rather than tell them they’d just dug a hole with spoons and filled it back in, i just thanked them and told them i’d finish the job. because i sure as heck don’t want to discourage that impulse!
