Season After Epiphany

In the church calendar, we are currently in the season after Epiphany, a season of light before Lent, with its intensity and its brooding. The figurative reason for this blog title, however, will have to be revealed in a future entry. It is an enlightening time!

Jon was out of town recently on yet another job interview. I was enormously proud of my management during that time, especially since he ended up having to be out of town an extra day due to a flight cancellation.

On Sunday afternoon, while Jon was probably still in the air, we did some painting.

It was clear the kids missed Papa already:

Adele works only in handprints.

I take a single-mom selfie:

Adele was thrilled to go to work with me after preschool Monday-Wednesday. On Tuesday, I actually convinced her to take her nap in my office, on the floor. Hoorah for multi-tasking!

Wednesday evening we were able to retrieve Jon, and I collapsed onto the couch while he made dinner. I'm so grateful this isn't my full-time gig!

Last weekend, for the holiday, we hit up the Blacksburg library and were happy to find that the therapy reading cat had an opening in her schedule. Miles picked the perfect book to read to Carrie!

She got pretty seriously loved while we were in there.

On Wednesday, we finally got to see some snow.

For Dr. King day, Monday, we took a family day at the Roanoke Science Museum. My favorite was the butterfly room! I do love a greenhouse in winter. One misses the humidity and the smell of growing things.

The Grunerts also (predictably) spent a long while in the vintage arcade section.

I loved the informative panels in this exhibit. 

#VideoGameWisdom

The view from the windows is one of my favorite things about the museum. I think Roanoke is so pretty.

This "Augmented Reality Sandbox" allowed the kids to change the form of the sand and watch how it would affect the flow and position of water. The machine reads the form of the land and makes the "water" move accordingly. So cool!

There had to be one more trip to the butterfly garden. We just soaked it up. I was soothed after a very trying week.

Miles continues to sneak selfies onto my phone. He really favors the black&white filter. 

Tuesday found me again on my commute, a bit colder than usual.

It was another hard week, as it was the first week of classes and I have an exceptionally full schedule this semester. My own class is "Mega Texts," all looooong novels, so it's delicious but a lot of reading (obviously). It's a time of many new projects. But just when my strength was at a low, we learned Virginia Tech was, against all precedent, cancelling school in advance of the snow! Seeing as we probably have about 8 inches and it's still snowing hard (totals anticipated to be between 18-24 inches), it was the right decision. 

Soon to come: pictures of snow! And, who knows, an Epiphany more or two.