37: too cold for...pretty much everything

We didn't get any snow days yet, but today they called everyone at about 7:00 am saying the school basically was having a day off because it was too cold to function. The boiler wasn't working and fuel lines were frozen so they had no heat, and heat seems really important when it's -24 below. (I don't actually know what the temperature was in the morning--the day before my car said -24 when I dropped the boys off at school and I think it got colder after that.)

I stayed home with the kids because I was worried about leaving them alone when it was so cold. Or mostly worried about leaving Lex, who doesn't believe anything I say. It looked beautiful and sunny and deceivingly warm, and I didn't want him getting stuck outside somewhere. He's the one who touched the hot stove because he wouldn't believe it was still hot after we turned it off.  This was last year, not when he was tiny. He did it after I told him it was still hot and we discussed at length how long it takes things to cool off and the lights built into the stove to remind people it's still hot. And then just reached up and touched it anyway. I think the blisters swayed him to side with me on this issue from now on, but we have no experience with extreme cold. Last night after an ambulance call I couldn't feel my fingers by the time I got back from the ambulance shed--about 4 blocks away--and had trouble opening the door to the house. I didn't trust him to figure out the danger of this situation by experience.

The kids did  have fun experimenting with just how cold it really was. We turned boiling water into steam, froze bubbles, and played outside in really short spans. I tried to get work done, which was much less successful than I'd like, but expected since I was also trying to keep track of eight kids. They got the boiler in the school working by the afternoon and actually had practices and the basketball game and drove the middle school girls to Ronan to play their game. I wasn't too on board with this--really sometimes it's okay to cancel things. There are very few reasons to get people out and driving around when it's that cold and I don't really think kids' sports is one of them.