I fully intended to post this entry yesterday, but I dozed off before I could finish it. After a day of shoveling and hiking, sledding (or, rather, helping AJ sled), and tree hauling, a warm laptop on my knees was all the soporific I needed.

Yes, it snowed. It snowed and snowed and snowed. It�s winter in Chicago. That�s what it does. It was just a foot, but to hear the weathermen talk about it, you�d think it was the apocalypse.

Still, it was enough to cancel school in our town. After AJ �helped� his dad shovel out the driveway, he and I headed up the street to check out the action at the sledding hill. The sledding hill is a formidable slope that masquerades as a horse pasture in the summer. When you�re standing at the top looking over the drop, it looks perilously steep � no doubt the reason it attracts every pre-teen with a snowboard within a five mile radius. It is certainly too steep for AJ�s little wooden sled. We resigned ourselves to the bunny slope above the drop off where we could see the big kids performing daredevil feats while we were safely out of harm�s way. At first the snow was too deep for AJ�s sled � it kept tipping over. So I sat AJ down on the ground, grabbed his feet and dragged him down the hill, as he laughed hysterically. After a couple of sledless passes down the hill, it was smooth enough for a sled ride. And another one. And another. It�s surprisingly exhausting hiking up the bunny slope over and over with a heavy wooden sled.

On the walk home, I stepped off into a drainage ditch, which had been hidden in a snowdrift, and landed up to my waist in snow. AJ thought this was most amusing and couldn�t wait to tell his dad that �Mommy fell down on her butt,� which he did with great relish several times.

After reliving the sledding experience with dad on our icy driveway while sitting in a recycling bin, AJ finally decided that it was time for hot chocolate and we headed in to get warm. We both took long naps in the afternoon and spent the afternoon playing school.

I�m not sure who came up with the playing school game. It is possible, like many things these days, it was inspired by his Snoopy books and videos. In the morning before breakfast he had been pretending to take his snoopy figures to school in his toy bus. But in the afternoon, he decided he wanted to go to school himself, so we practiced reading and writing letters, we did some addition and subtraction problems and counted as high as we could. Then we had science class. We have been studying the planets this week, as AJ found a book at the library about them. He�s been starting to ask me questions I can�t answer off the top of my head, things like, �Mommy, how hot is the sun?� The book is particularly helpful for such questions, particularly because it supplies the answer not only with really big and exciting numbers (10,000 degrees Farenheit!), but relates them to things in AJ�s experience (20 times hotter than your oven!).

By recess time, it was getting too dark to go outside, so instead, we embarked on our annual Epiphany Day task of removing all the Christmas decorations and taking down the tree. Usually I�m pretty happy to get the tree out of the house by now, but AJ has been so enraptured by the tree this year, that it makes me a little sad. It was never just �the Christmas tree� to him. It was always �the pretty, pretty Christmas tree.� As we set to work, we told AJ that it was time to say goodbye to the tree, that it would be gone when he got up. He looked very serious, sat down on the plastic box holding his Peanuts figures that he�d had in his hand, and took one long last look.

�Bye-bye, pretty, pretty Christmas tree,� he said softly.

After he went to bed we removed the lights, unscrewed the tree from the stand and carried it outside. And then, just like that, under the star-studded sky, in a shower of needles a sharp intake of breath that smelled of pine and of snow, the holidays ended.

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