The windy city.

A week after our move, and the wind started. Apparently its a yearly thing, that the wind howls and gusts and makes the second half of winter 300x more miserable. Where does it come from? Why does it blow so hard? Will it stop soon? And where has all my laundry gone? I swear we had more on the line. There is an ominous trail of pegs scattered across my lawn, but when I peeked over into my neighbors yard I didn't see any clothes... So either they've blown further away, or I'm just paranoid. I might start writting our address on our clothes as insurance though.

Our house is on a hill. It possesses lovely sweeping views of the valley, the surrounding hills, other houses, and the industrial area. Its also on the windy side of the hill. All morning we've had birds huddled into the sunniest sheltered part of our lawn.

The wind is really something. It sounds like a cyclone, but without the rain. It looks beautiful and sunny outside, but its so cold and miserable. The porch railings are shuddering in the wind. Willow hasn't even asked to go outside once today. She's been watching a lot of movies and tv for the past two weeks while we pack, then unpacked and settled in. She enjoys beading, and I stockpiled a small collection of those Lego kits for her to build- just the little cheap ones that come in bags or boxes. I got two robot monster thingo ones, one from their castle line and one from their Lego friends line. So far she's done one robot monster one, and attempted the Lego friends one. The Lego friends one is much more straight forward than the monster, but the monster had much better instructions, so Willow was actually able to assemble more of the robot one without guidance. She struggles to clip the blocks together, but she's new to Lego, so... It will come to her. She loves her duplo animals a friend gave her for her birthday. However, duplo and Lego cost serious money, but you can get Lego in little building sets for less than $20, so... That's why she now has Lego :) I thought it would give us something to do post move/ in the winter, plus the little sets I thought would be good for her to learn some instruction following, since its one of the main skills she will need next year at school. (She's nailed the social and personality side of it). Maybe for Christmas we will get her those boxes full of random blocks, to let her imagination run wild... Or maybe she will buy us something, hah. Willow's saved up the money for an Elsa from frozen dress, but of course, not a single store around here has one in stock.  Willows feeling quite flush and generous with her money, and is constantly offering it to m and myself when she hears us discussing Things We Can't Afford Yet, which makes me feel quite rotten. Because yes, on one hand, we cannot afford that stain blocking undercoat which is like $74 for 4L *this* week, because we've already spent like $200 on other stuff at the hardware store. We are enormously privileged to be able to buy a house in the first place, and so lucky to have money left over so we can do stuff- like buy blinds, and a heater for the bathroom, and a new showerhead, and food.
But still. Its really nice of Willow to repeatedly offer us her money- even if technically, we did give it to her.
It also makes me feel bad, because she's 4- like hey girl, don't feel like you have to help out and support your family financially just yet.