Snug as Bugs

Apparently I am currently living in a reenactment of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie.

Including the whole "Pa is away from home bringing the furs to Independence to trade for supplies and about to get caught in a blizzard in which he will hole up in a snowbank and eat the Christmas candy to stay alive."

(Except it's more of a "The Husband is away on another trip" type of thing. And I don't believe there is candy involved. But I could be wrong.)

Here is the current state of my driveway:

See that trudged path there? That was made by The Girl on her way to school. (The other path on the front yard is made by our poor mail carrier. We don't have a front walk. So he makes his own, poor guy.)

That path also equals the sum total of snow-clearing that I intend to do this week.

For one, our snowblower is an absolute monster. Crazy heated handles, two stage, throw the snow into the next county - that kind of monster. I can't even move it, much less start it.

But more importantly, I'm not clearing snow because I don't have to. The kids bus to school. I bus to work. I can see the grocery store from my sunroom as I type. The piano teacher comes to our house. My French class meets at the high school a few blocks away. In short, we can live our regular lives and we do not need to start up the ol' Jetta at all.

A happy accident? Not a bit. I've been extremely intentional about building this lifestyle. We don't do extracurricular activities that require driving. We made sure to prioritize living in a walkable area that was close to bus routes. And we reap the benefits, particularly on days like today, when The Husband is away yet again and somehow everyone needs to eat and get to school and try to work.

Even better when "work" looks like this:

There's been a lot of brouhaha on the interwebs lately about working from home. Yeah, I get that there's a temptation to slack. And I also get that there is a lot to be said about hallway conversations and just being part of the general hum that is the office.

However, being able to work from home allows me to skip the two-hour commute that awaited me on a snowy day today. It allows me to easily accommodate a last-minute decision by the school division to start school two hours late. It allows me to feed The Boy breakfast while I call in to a meeting in Minneapolis while I instant-message someone in Bangalore while I help The Girl make her lunch.

(It also allows me to blog on my lunch break, woot!)

In short, I'm enormously grateful for being able to sit here in my yoga pants drinking coffee while the snow falls and not have to stress about whether to miss work to take care of the munchkins or whether to leave them to fend for themselves while I brave the commute.

It's definitely a work-life balance I can live with.