Tuesday, December 22, 2009

A First On the Twenty-second

There are sixty-something school districts in Florida. Four of them decided that it would be a fine idea to have school in session this, the week of Christmas. Guess we are just lucky to be one of the four. I discovered today when we started to put up the calendar piece that I have never needed a December calendar piece with a 22 on it before. We have never been in school on the twenty-second of December. We had to make a new calendar piece.

As you can imagine, it has been a wild (and exhausting) couple of weeks in elementary schools here. However, my kids were actually better this week than last, (thank goodness!) and better today than yesterday.

On Monday morning we had what was forecasted to be the coldest morning in 2009. I am not sure if it lived up to that, but it was definitely cold standing out at car duty for thirty minutes.

The frost was heavy.

We don’t get snow here, so I like to get the kids to bundle up and take magnifiers and go examine the frost crystals before they melt.

100_9630

100_9631

100_9634

100_9623

Of course, sometimes the grass is whiter on the other side of the fence.

100_9624

Here is a lovely crystal-coated plant called hen-bit.

100_9629

And isn’t this little spider web stunning?

100_9628

I guess if we had not been in school this week, we would have missed some of this.

On the other hand, I would have done at least some holiday baking by now and have my shopping completed.

3 comments:

Ducks said...

This is beautiful. 2 weeks ago we got freezing rain and 20F. We saw frozen spider web. That was cool thing to see.

Liz said...

When my sister and I were in elementary school one of our favorite things about winter was the crunchy grass at the bus stop. We'd get very excited and stomp around roaring like Godzilla crushing frozen grass cities. It was very rare, but definitely a treat.

Thanks for taking me back to childhood for a brief moment.

Kimberlee said...

I certainly hope you are getting some extra days off around New Year's! Several of my teacher friends had to work until the 23rd. That's just insane!

I love that you took your kids out to examine the frost. So fun! And the spider web was great.

Hope your time off is restful. All the best in 2010!