London in the Snow again – 18/01/13

Apparently there’s been some weather of some sort today. You wouldn’t know it from Facebook, would you? The last time we had settling snow in South London was last February and you may recall how I singularly failed to do anything interesting in it. Well, here’s a scoop for ya…. this year was no better.

I’m ill today, OK? Nothing hugely deserving of your sympathy, but a cold with a flu-ey edge. Enough that every breath is laboured and my head feels like a mouse has died in there. And I wasn’t in the best mood because I went to empty Roo’s potty this morning in the downstairs toilet and….a mouse had died in there. I did what most women would do, which was to lock the door and leave it for my husband to deal with. I am so unempowered sometimes.

(I’m now picking this up on Saturday morning cause last night I was actually Too Sick To Blog. Now there’s serious…)

So, it was Friday morning and I wasn’t well. We had no snow whatsoever, so Roo, Eva and I snuggled on the sofa and watched Beebies. Eva and I fell asleep around the time of “Rhyme Rocket” and thankfully dozed through “Something Special”. Waking up around “Show Me Show Me”, I noticed a flurry of posts from London friends on Facebook about their various levels of snow. I replied along the lines of how we had literally none.

And then I actually stood up and looked out of the window.

Snow!

Roo climbed on the table to have a look and got instantly excited. “I want to go out there! I want to put my coat on NOW!”. I suggested maybe getting out of his pyjamas would be a good first step. It took us half an hour, but we got snow-ready:

I still wasn’t well, and a little dozy but I didn’t see the harm of a few minutes’ romp in the snow. At the time, it was Nursery Time minus 105mins, so we didn’t have time to go to a park, but I thought we could do the next best thing – go to Tesco!

There was a very thin covering of snow at the time. We made a few pathetic snowballs, but it was all a bit unimpressive:

Aha, Oho a trail in the snow! Whose is this trail and where does it go? It looks a little like a little shoe…could this be the trail of a Big Bad Roo?

We made it to Tesco, we bought some lunch for me and Eva (Roo preferred a CBeebies magazine to lunch), we saw a teeny baby that was the brother of Roo’s nursery friend, and we stopped briefly at “Little Park”.

All was going well. Except we had lost one of Roo’s gloves. But then we found it in the snow. Hooray! Everything was going fine.

We got home and I started my customary search through my bag for my keys. Couldn’t find them. Started taking stuff out of the bag. Really couldn’t find them. Emptied entire contents of bag out on  the doorstep. No, really there were no keys in there.

Everything was NOT going fine.

Time to head back out into the snow. Luckily, I remembered the exact point at which I’d opened my bag to find my umbrella, deducing that it might have been the point where the keys fell out. And I was right! Nestled in the snow, there were…my keys. Hooray!

In case you hadn’t guessed, I really wasn’t feeling grand by this point. Stressing around in the snow wasn’t helping the streaming-cold situation.

But we soldiered on. Soggy clothes on the radiator, lunch down the three of us, back out to nursery. Temper somewhat frayed, legs aching with flu-ishness…at least I knew that once Roo was safely dumped at nursery, I could go home and just lie there and watch “Come Dine With Me”.

You can guess what’s coming, right? We got to the bottom of the ramps, 5 minutes before nursery time and I got a text. Nursery was closed. I called and begged them to take him but no, they were having power outages and everyone was being sent home.

The winds howled and Mummy was wild, off to nursery went the stubborn child.

Y’see, he just wouldn’t believe me. He was so looking forward to playing in the snow with his nursery friends instead of this grumpy, flaky Mummy that he just wouldn’t listen as I repeatedly told him – with failing voice – that nursery was closed. He kept trying to scoot up the ramps or the stairs, saying “come on Mummy, nursery’s up here” but I pulled him back. Eventually, somehow, I got him home and he sat on the sofa and sobbed “I want the snow to disappear”. Poor Boy.

Time for reinforcements. Nathan had “not much” going on at work, so was free to come home. He arrived with doughnuts, I went to bed, he sorted out the dead mouse. All was slightly right-er with the world. And there is even more snow today, so maybe the boy will get to build a snowman after all.