It's snow joke...

It's snowing.  As in, properly snowing.  This is unusual so early in the season; normally we don't see a fall this heavy until around Christmas and possibly not until January, but this year it appears Dyed Moroz (Father Frost) has come early and gone more than a little overboard with his white special effects.

At this moment in time we've gone past this morning's annoying little crystals which swirled around stinging cheeks, and moved onto the pretty, fluffy type of flake that falls picturesquely from the sky before joining zillions of others on the ground.

It looks very picture-postcard like, a good preparation for the festive season.  I should find my camera and get busy.  But you know what?

I am not impressed.

On the one hand I want to wrap up warm and never go out again, and on the other - I want to wrap up warm and never go out again.  Oh, OK.  I'll get over my temporary mood (which may, I'll concede, be more than slightly hormonal), and no doubt by next week I will have unearthed my cross country skis, re-mastered the Moscow Shuffle*, and rediscovered my usual state of very British awe at how Russia's climate refuses to be ignored, but in the meantime I am somewhat melancholy over the fact that I may not see grass again until next  Spring.

Which is - in case you're interested and before you mock my dramatics - due sometime around mid-April.

To cap it all, I will need to pick the boys up from school on foot this evening because the snow ploughs are not keeping up with the weather and the roads are not really safe to drive on, so will no doubt end up pulling the pair of them up the hill on the sledge behind me. (This was quite good fun when we arrived here 3 years ago and they were 4 & 6, but a little more challenging now they're 6 and 9).  On the plus side, however, I'm sure that by that time my inner Mummy Pollyanna will have resurfaced and I'll be making the best of it for their sakes,

It will probably sound something like this:  "What do you mean, it's cold and it's wet?  Come on!  It's snowing!  It's beautiful!"

Yes.  That should do it.

PM squares her shoulders and sets off into the blizzard** on the school run.


*the art of walking on icy uncleared pavements / sidewalks without going head over heels.
** 'Blizzard' may be a slight exaggeration, for effect...

Do you bubble-wrap your children?

Well, do you?

I'm asking because, whilst I try not to, sometimes I wonder if I should. A couple of weekends ago Boy #1 had a nasty accident on a sledging hill. He was knocked into the path of an oncoming sledge and ended up with a deep cut that needed 5 stitches, just above one eye. And when I say 'just above one eye' I mean, just above one eye. As it was, he's just been left with a scar and a story and no lasting damage, but a centimeter further south and he might have lost his eye. It doesn't bear thinking about.

But that's just it.

Should I think about it?

Accidents like this happen to kids all the time. They're part of growing up, those broken bones and scars, aren't they? And yet, if the worst had happened, how could I live with myself that I hadn't made him wear some kind of a helmet?

It seems molly-coddling in the extreme of course, to suggest that an 8 year old boy should wear a helmet when he goes sledging, and yet it was icy - which I knew - and we live in Russia where emergency care, whilst excellent in this instance, is not as easily obtainable as back in the UK - which I also knew. So was I being neglectful by allowing him to be out there without wearing a helmet which, for all I know, may have made no difference in this instance?

Or was I simply allowing him to be an 8 year old boy and do the things that 8 year boys do, picking up the injuries that 8 year old boys acquire in the process?

In my saner moments, I know it's the latter. But sometimes, I still wonder; should I bubble wrap my children?

Life in the Freezer

(with apologies to David Attenborough for appropriating the title of his tv series, but it seemed... appropriate...)

What to tell you about our two weeks in Moscow so far? There's so much that I almost feel as if there's too much. Every day something happens and I think 'I must write / blog about that', and add it to my ever-growing mental list, where it slips to the bottom and invariably gets mislaid. So I think what I'm going to do is take it one subject at a time, and I imagine that from the title of this post you've probably guessed what today's is.

I've never been too good with extremes of temperature. As a wimpy girl I once collapsed weeping on the kitchen floor when informed that Iwould have to go back out into the cold (cold as in, oh, a paltry -4 degC) to catch the school bus that was finally on it's way after having kept us waiting for 40 minutes whilst the driver defrosted it. And when in Holland over Christmas once and I experienced -10 degC, I thought that was probably the most I could take.

When, 15 years ago, Husband was working over here after we first met and regaled me with tales of minus 25, I thought he was crazy. I mean, what kind of idiot would willingly subject themselves to a country that dishes out a climate like that, for chrissake? (Possibly the same kind of idiot who would move to said country in the depths of the coldest winter for 4 years, but let's not go there). Never mind that he always assured me that -10 degC in Moscow doesn't feel any colder than minus 2 in London due to the much greater humidity in the UK (that lovely raw, damp cold that comes in straight off the Channel, in other words), I just thought he was trying to soften me up and get me to move there. Which I never would. Obviously.

But now? I have moved here, and guess what; minus 10?

Minus 10 is for wimps. I laugh in the face of minus 10 nowadays... Pretty much like Husband did in my face this morning when, on discovering that it was minus 21 degC as we walked Boy #1 to school this morning, I remarked that it did feel a little chilly.

God, I hate it when he's right.

Obviously, when it's this cold, you do have treat the weather with respect. And that includes staying inside as much as possible and when you do have to go out, poncing about in some of the ugliest snow boots known to woman, but when it comes to keeping my toes I take no fashion prisoners. Luckily, it seems that neither does anyone else (with the exception of the fur-clad mummies at the school gate, next to whom I feel very dingy in my North Face quilted coat and Monsoon wool hat), and if you make mistake of going out not wearing anything on your head, you can expect to be stopped and harangued by strangers in the street for your stupidity.

As for the children, well they get bundled up in skipants over their trousers, with snow boots, thermal tops, jumpers, ski jackets, hats, scarves, and - in the case of Boy #2 who at 4 is finding this especially hard to handle - two lots of gloves. Let me tell you, getting that lot onto a recalcitrant child at 8am tends to slow you down somewhat. And even bundled up like that, the cold still affects them. What should be a 10 minute walk to school is currently a 20 minute crawl when my youngest is with us, due to the cold slowing him down.

I thought I'd beaten that by buying a sledge so I could pull him along in double quick time (practical and picturesque, how stylish!), but yesterday - dammit - Moscow's road sweepers did what they do best and got rid of all the snow. One day it was there, the next, gone to the great snow pile in the sky at the edge of the city somewhere. So, no snow means no sledge. I must be the only person in the city praying for more of the white stuff in the hope we make it to school on time.

However, I'm determinedly looking on the bright side. It's going to warm up tomorrow; the weather forecast is for cloud and only -12 degC; that's practically tropical compared to today.

I may hang some washing out.