Piggies cold

It got cold suddenly and it's been below zero the past few nights. We have a dusting of maybe an inch of cold, sugary snow making the yard all pretty and covering up the unraked leaves for the season. Our big patch of garlic is all planted and snug under a thick bed of straw and leaves, and our other tender bits - the hollyhock, the bleeding hearts - are also well covered. It's not so much the cold, they say, it's the heaving on warm days that hurts the perennials. We still have some unplanted tulip bulbs that we can't put into the rock-hard ground, so we'll start them in flats indoors and then set them out under a thick blanket of straw covered with leaves and soil.

Anyways, so it's pretty cold already tonight, -3 at the moment, and Noah decided he wanted to go out and walk around the deck. After a minute or so he said "cold, piggies," but I'm not sure he made the connection to walk back inside to make them warm again. Papa carried him in and we warmed up against papa's warm belly and the piggies are happy again.

Junior just jumped into the laundry tub ("papa, hiding"), and that ended with a "boom" tip over onto the floor. My happy boy warm and joyful in the sunroom on a cold night.