Snow! Hey, oh!

As much as I’ve grown to love Vancouver over the last 14 years, the summers will never be hot and humid enough, and the winters never white enough. I guess you can take the girl out of Montreal, but you can never take the Montreal out of the girl… or something like that!

So, days like today make me feel like I live in paradise! Vancouver is under a whack of snow!* Woo-hoo!!

Liam came back from his dad’s at noon and the first words out of his mouth were, “I want to make some money. Where’s the shovel?”

He shoveled our back deck and stairs and then the front walk. He asked me how much he’d earned.

“Well… you’ve just done a chore that contributes to your allowance.” (He gets $20/month).

I was fully expecting him to complain or try to negotiate, using “special circumstance” as an argument. And I would have offered him $5. But he didn’t. He asked how much I thought it would be worth if he shoveled our next door neighbour’s walk and sidewalk.

Five bucks.

He started working. I suggested that if he hoped to be paid, he should find out if she was willing to pay him before he did the job. He looked up at her house and said, “I can’t ask Angela for money. She can’t do the work herself. I think I should just do it to be nice, like you rake her leaves to be nice.”

God, I love my kid.

While he was doing Angela’s walks, I did the sidewalk in front of our house, and the walkway of the duplex attached to us. (I could claim to have been being nice, since they’re young, first-time, home-owners who own nothing to maintain a yard. But that would be a lie. I did it because I love being in the snow in this city.)

Liam "caught" me.

“Excuse me, Mommy, I hate to be rude, but before you do any more shoveling, could you please ask if I was planning to do it, first?”

Oops. There I was thinking about me, and my needs, forgetting that Liam had a goal to earn money so he could buy some books at the school Book Fair this coming week.

“Hey, how about I pay you for doing Angela’s walks since I would have had to do them if you hadn’t. Good enough deal?”

“Great. I’m going to see if Ross wants me to do his walkway and stairs.”

Ross negotiated Liam down to $3 since the city sidewalk had already been done by his duplex co-owner.

An hour later. We’re now sitting drinking hot chocolate. Liam is making a gingerbread house (a kit… I’m not that good a mother), and the snow is still coming down! If school is cancelled tomorrow, there will be lots of opportunity to re-shovel everything that was cleared this afternoon. What fun!

* MVL, also a Vancouver resident, called to challenge me on my assertion that we had a "foot" of snow. Fine. Maybe it was a little bit of an exaggeration. Although there is much more snow at the top of the hill where I live than at his place near the water, I stand corrected.