What to Do When It's -20 (Again!)

As has the rest of the country, we have been experiencing some pretty extreme winter weather the last few weeks. Our winding road, which is typically well-plowed and dry, is now coated in packed snow and ice. The driving conditions don't really matter though, since everything we would normally go to has been cancelled the last 2 weeks!

Anyway, we have been stuck inside the house. A lot. We have been trying to come up with exciting things to do:

• Continued potty training! Hey, when there's nowhere to go, there are no excuses to not work on it! We are now starting to run out of stickers, and Ethan totally knows what to do. Does he always do it? Of course not. Am I getting tired of cleaning up after him like a puppy? Oh yes. By the way, it seems like 13-week-old Samson was 100 times easier to train than 2-year-old Ethan. I guess he didn't have to worry about potties and undies, though.
• Consuming ridiculous amounts of food for the Super Bowl. Ethan is getting to be pretty good at eating dip with a tortilla chip. Emma tries hard. The Super Bowl was particularly enjoyable this year, because Kathy was here, and both kids stuck to her like glue basically the whole time. I actually got to watch the game (I mean, the commercials)!
• Unburying Samson's food bowl, which was covered in snow that he apparently can't find his food through. Then doing it again, 5 or 6 more times. He is convinced we never feed him, but he has layers and layers of petrified food frozen solid in his bowl. I guess he'll find it in the spring.
• Wrapping up in blankets. Ethan's new phrase is "nice, warm, snuggly, " which describes all blankets, pillows, and warm couches. He always says the whole phrase.
• Playing on the bed. Both kids think our bed is the ultimate awesome playground/wrestling mat. It is also, as Ethan pointed out, "nice, warm, snuggly."
• Going "grocery shopping" with the laundry basket, picking up random items from the floor. I LOVED this game! It made cleaning up stray toys really easy! It is also fun to hear Ethan narrate the shopping trip to Emma as she follows behind him. "Gonna get one more thing." "You can't eat it 'til we pay for it!"
• Eating oatmeal. It is sticky enough for Emma to do herself! Awesome!