cold

Do you see? Do you see the silvery gray beauty here? Isn’t it grand?! An investment in family life it is. We spend half of our life driving to and fro with tools to work on various projects that come our way. For the past several months it has been to work on cabinets. Building, remodeling, repairing, un-fencing, work with concrete… we enjoy doing all sorts of things on our long weekends. Things we would not be able to do if we only had our car to drive us around in. And we have enjoyed our little truck very much for these purposes. However, the Ranger that we had, lovely though it was, is no longer going to work for our little family. Come March, Lord willing, we will need to carry a car seat with us. There is no space in a Ranger for a car seat. There is barely enough room for a pregnant lady (certainly not if there’s more people than just the driver and herself). So we needed to decide…how much is it worth to us to be able to keep up our lifestyle of working, as much as possible, together on evenings and weekends? We’re not going to leave Baby anywhere. Baby is a part of us. And Baby needs Mama for food. And Mama and Daddy want to do things together…with Baby. Also, we live in a part of the country where, for several months out of the year, we get snowstorms and wind, ground blizzards and freezing temperatures, and during those times it would be quite helpful to have a way to drive somewhere as a family if we needed to…courtesy of 4-wheel drive. A way has worked out very well for us to try to accomplish these things…a blessing from God, to be sure. I am quite thrilled!
~’::
Our lovely part of the country has spent this last weekend in bitterly cold temperatures. Yep, even weather.com describes the temperature right now (and for tomorrow!) as "bitterly cold". Last night was super cold because of the wind chill. When we woke up this morning our thermometer said -16 (and then proceeded to drop another degree), but the wind chill was -29 because of the wind. And it felt like it. It rather took your breath away to step outside and breathe in the air. My man is so good to me...he went down into our freezing cold basement to get his Carhartt insulated bibs and warmed them by the fire for me to wear when we went to do some errands this morning. It was rather a funny thing to watch me try to get in them, though! My tummy is just too big to be squashed into regular clothes. Even ones made to handle winter layers inside of them. I got them on alright, but zipping the front just wasn’t going to happen. Nor was zipping down the pant legs over my jeans…my man had to do that for me. Bending over to take care of my boots or snow pants zippers just isn’t one of those things I can do anymore. I was definitely glad for those bibs. Even just standing in a parking lot made you feel that any exposed skin was being burned.

We’ve stayed nice and cozy inside our little house, though. We kept the fire in the stove burning hot, and have really had a pleasant time of it. You can see in the picture what a lovely bed of coals I had when I went to add a log this afternoon…glowing and covered in blue flames. Mmmm. Cozy!

We have really gone through our woodpile fast in these last couple of months because of the cold temperatures. This weekend, of all weekends, was the one we had specified as the one where we would restock our supply. Since we are using our wood especially heavily now, this was something we could not really get out of (even with the temperatures as such). We were blessed with an opportunity to obtain this wood that we needed from some friends. An added [huge] blessing was that it was already cut, stacked, and dried for us…a person really couldn’t ask for more. So we took our new truck on its first little adventure this afternoon to pick up our load of wood. The sun was setting as we did this. It was so beautiful to see it across the icy fields. The air was clear and crisp and cold. Lovely. It made one glad for the warmth of a truck cab!