It is rare for a real snow to fall in Austin. Ordinarily, our frozen precipitation comes in the form of sleet, freezing rain, or even hail. On January 10th though, we were gifted with a real honest-to-goodness snow.

When it first started snowing, they’d scrape the snow off the cars to make their snowballs.

Rarer still, it snowed enough to actually accumulate. For several hours, fat fluffy flakes of snow fell, sometimes only a sprinkling, other times quite hard. We kept going out and taking photos and playing in it, fearing that it would be gone all too soon. Maya and Ian chased each other through the yard, lobbing snowballs as they ran. Early in the day, they had built teeny little driveway snow-people. I was impressed that we had enough snow even for that. By the afternoon, a good 2 to 3 inches had accumulated. Sean and I went out in the yard with them, helping them roll up the snow into a good base and body for a more normal-sized snowman. Sure there were leaves in the snow, but who cares! We got to build snowmen with the kids in friggin’ Texas. Maya and I even attempted to build a snow cat, thought its “teeth” kept falling out.

Snow family!

School had started back the week before. It went about as well as one might have expected for the first week back after about three weeks of fun and freedom. Austin has been in Stage 5 of coronavirus hell for quite a while now, and the district was kind of on-again, off-again about where they wanted the kids to do their learning through the first part of the month. I don’t feel like hearing myself complaining any more about the school and work thing, so I won’t. But the situation has not in any way resolved.

Luckily, there are fun things to look forward to still. Over MLK Day weekend, we went cabin camping with our bubble family friends at Black Rock Park. This was so much fancier than our tent camping last November. The cabins … were HEATED. That was my favorite thing. We had to use a communal bathroom and cooking was still a little complicated, but at least we were snuggly warm while we slept.

Herbie and Maya and the pretty sunset

We packed more things into the Prius than we could really manage easily, so if this is going to be part of our life, sigh, we’re probably going to have to upsize the car. We learned a lot of things on this trip from our more camping-experienced friends. 1 – Bring or purchase firewood; when camping around a near-treeless lake, you can’t count on found wood. 2 – Hammocks. 3 – Remembering the fuel-line for your camp stove is mission critical. Yeah, we forgot ours. Luckily, we were able to borrow our friends’ stove as needed and we had brought our small backpacking stove as a backup.

Note to self: purchase a camping hammock

The best part of the trip was how much the kids could just run far and wide and play, play, play. Sure there was a fair bit of drama, a few hurt feelings, a kid trying to get run over. But generally, it was very positive. I like that the kids get to play with their friends, and to do so in a place where they could semi-safely experience a bit of freedom. Crazy Maya is impervious to cold; she actually got in the lake and played for a while. (Ian got suited up to play in the water, put one toe in, and then gave it up as a very bad idea.)

So much art!

By the end of the weekend, the kids were feeling sad that it would all be over soon, so we hastily made plans to have dinner together the next weekend. After trudging through another hell week of virtual school and two full time jobs, we drove out to their house. I think they had fun. They got to try out Ruby and Herbie’s trampoline. Maya rode bikes with Herbie – her first time riding around in a neighborhood. The kids all made gigantic bubbles with Holly. They art-ed with Ruby.

Woody the Wood Duck is very photogenic

The last weekend in January, I took the kids out to Mills Pond, mostly to give Sean a break. The pond is local-famous for hosting a wood duck, who we hear is called Woody. Maya has, since she first received her Big Book of Birds however many years ago, wanted to go on vacation to see a wood duck. She and I had been to Mills Pond earlier in the month to try out the nice binoculars she got for Christmas, and while we saw some different ducks, we weren’t graced with Woody’s presence. Not so on this visit. He paddled right up to the doc we were standing on, presumably looking for a food handout (which is not allowed). Both kids had their cameras out snap, snap, snapping photos of ducks. And after a good walk around the lake, we headed back home.

Coronavirus numbers were the worst they’ve ever been this past month – nearly 100,000 people died of COVID-19 in the United States alone. The number of new cases has been trending down a bit lately, and hopefully now that the holidays are behind us and especially as more and more people are vaccinated, those numbers will continue to improve. Right now in Texas, we aren’t eligible for a vaccine. Groups 1A (front-line health workers and residents at long-term care facilities) and 1B (people age 65 and older and people with certain high-risk health conditions) are the only ones able to right now, and even at that, I think demand is far exceeding supply. We are hopeful that by this summer, the grown-ups in the house will be able to get vaccinated. And then hopefully by the fall, the vaccine will be approved for kids Maya and Ian’s age and they can be protected too. Travis County – 12/31 50,595 cases and 549 deaths – 01/31 68,731 cases and 655 deaths. Texas – 12/31 1,766,307 cases and 27,944 deaths – 01/31 2,376,344 cases and 37,074 deaths. United States – 12/31 19,968,087 cases and 345,737 deaths – 01/31 26,185,357 cases and 441,319 deaths. The World – 12/31 83,424,446 cases and 1,818,116 deaths – 01/31 102,944,487 cases and 2,227,568 deaths.