Keeping Warm

It's been unseasonably cold the last couple days (a low of 22 this morning), and Anna and I have been making fires daily for about a week now. This has always been Scott's thing, but he was recovering from minor surgery last week and then was out of town for a couple days. And I have learned that I really enjoy tending a fire. This first picture is from a day last week when Anna was home from school with a cold. I had cut off access to screens for the day, so she sewed a dress for her stuffed kitten and took a picture of it. Our fire is blazing in the background. 

Out of all of Anna's stuffed animals, Pepper is most excited when she nabs this one.

We had light snow yesterday morning. I'm glad it's supposed to warm up this weekend as there's still a lot of leaf blowing that needs to happen.

Our wintry yard.

This last picture is our family water bottle. One of our team members, Gwen, left it for us at the end of her year in Nice. Team members sometimes left things that they couldn't fit in their suitcases, and this is my very favorite left behind item. I had never used a hot water bottle before, but quickly warmed to it. ( :

Last year, Anna claimed it as her own. Heating the water and filling it up became a part of our nightly routine. I came across it a couple weeks ago in Scott's bathroom cupboard and have been using it at night to keep my feet warm. I appreciate that it's warm, but doesn't have claws, meow,  or move as the other similarly-sized warm object in the house does.

Thank you, Gwen!

The problem is that Anna noticed the resurfacing of the hot water bottle, and then two days ago, Justin saw it and put dibs on it (a family thing with things that are in short supply...in Nice, the kids would call dibs on the bathroom when we were on the way home since there was just one. Once, after we moved here, Anna called dibs on the bathroom, and when I pointed out that we have enough bathrooms to go around, she called dibs on the dog. Smart girl). 

So, I just ordered two water bottles with soft-looking covers that should arrive soon. It's the flannel cover that makes ours so nice, so am hoping the new ones are as soft. I thought about saving them as fun Christmas presents, but I don't want to share for a month and a half.

Today, I started some organizing of a basement storage area that we never really got in order when we moved. So, I started a fire in the downstairs fireplace. There's a cozy area in the basement with a large picture window next to the fireplace that I thought would be a great place to sit and read. But, we rarely used it this year. Today's discovery is that this fireplace is the best one in the house. It's much wider than the two upstairs, so it actually does some heating, and it's easy to sit by it and put my feet up to warm them (a constant theme, I know...).

The nice thing about three fireplaces is that if Scott, Anna, and I each want our own fires, we could. Though I would totally call dibs on the basement one.

Btw, Justin shows little interest in pyromania, though he quickly pulled up a chair and put up his feet by this one when he got home from school.