I need a weekend to recover from my weekend.
So it snowed this weekend.

Again.

A lot.

Know how I know? Because we left our house here at 8:00 a.m. Saturday to make the 90-ish mile drive to start our house search. And three hours later, we made it. It snowed the whole way, and we've had enough heavy snowstorms this season that we have exhausted the snowplow and salt budget. Yes, seriously. My thinking would be, let's pay for some extra plowing and maybe forego an extra fireworks display or something, but apparently that's just madness - fireworks are IMPORTANT, after all. So we skidded, and slipped, and slid, and generally had a long, sphincter-clenching drive - but made it in one piece.

So, then, being idiots, we decided to stick with the original schedule, and we viewed 10 different houses through the day. By the end of that, I could barely make both of my eyes point in the same direction, much less form a coherent opinion about my potential home. We were at least smart enough not to impulsively buy something - we have 3 months, lots of time to (hopefully) make a reasonably intelligent decision. Or, as was the case in our current house, stumble upon a place by sheer dumb luck. Whatever.

Emily stayed with friends for the day. I am so, so glad she did. I love her to itty bitty pieces, and I would feel so bad if I had had to leave her in some stranger's house somewhere along the way. She's a good kid, but I would guess that her house-visiting limit falls somewhat lower than 10 in a day, and I shudder to think of the meltdowns we avoided. She would have fallen in love with the house that had the freakishly large fluorescent plastic butterflies affixed to every available wall and window, and would not have cared that (1) the current owners would probably take the butterflies with them, (2) if they didn't, I would take them down and burn them and consider that my gift to humanity, and (3) that house had apparently not been cleaned in, conservatively, 25 years.

And Jacob was such a good little trouper, he only had one crying episode when we were in the car and couldn't stop, and other than that he coped very well with the truly bizarre ritual of: get strapped in the carseat, drive for 10 minutes, get excited because here comes Mama!, snuggle with Mama, go into some stranger's house, walk around and look at weird rooms but don't play with any of the toys, get passed off between Mama and Dada while they take turns checking out basements and attics, blow raspberries at strangers' pets, go back out into the snowstorm, get strapped back into the carseat, repeat process.

There are a lot of things that must seem just so odd to babies. Getting the mail, for instance - ours is delivered to the front door, so once a day we wander to the door, open it, close it, and go on with our day. Or going to the bathroom. Every so often we get up off the couch or living room floor, wander into this other room with the echoes, sit there while Mama sits on the big white thing, and then we go on with our day.

So anyway, we made it through our day, and after the 3-hour drive home, it took me another half hour to make it the 5 miles to our friends' house to pick up Emily. She babbled a million miles an hour on the way home - partly out of sheer excitement and fun, and partly because if she stopped talking she would have fallen instantly asleep. We got her home and gently lobbed her in the general direction of her room, and she passed out mid-sentence. We collapsed soon after.

At 3:02, I heard a whimper from Emily's room, followed by, "Mommy? I think I just threw up." Now, think about it. Have you ever in your life been uncertain about that? Kids are so weird. But lo and behold, her suspicions were correct, so we got to go through the middle-of-the-night shower and new sheets routine. I got to make several trips between her room and the kitchen garbage can with little bags o' joy - I would line her bedroom garbage pail with a plastic bag, she would immediately fill it, lather, rinse, repeat.

She's all better now - was fine by noon on Sunday - and I'm pretty well recovered from the weekend as well. It's not supposed to snow again this week... but just in case, anybody got a guest room for me and Jacob? I swear I'll be driving straight south with a maniacal grin at the first sign of snow. I'll even get Jacob to blow raspberries at your dog.