Snow Days, Slow Days

Notes from a few days off the clock

Hey there y’all - an ice storm rolled through Texas (and basically 2/3 of the country) this weekend. Now, if you’re familiar with how we Texans handle snow and ice, you know that we don’t. Essentially, the state collectively decided it was safest to simply stop functioning. Roads iced over, schools closed, and every HEB was picked clean. My work shut down and my son’s daycare closed for two full days, which meant the carefully arranged systems that usually keep our household moving just stopped. So forgive me if this is a bit shorter and less polished than my typical work. With things warming back up, I should be back in full swing next week.

That said, it turns out an impromptu four-day weekend with my son was exactly what I needed.

It’s really easy to let the routines and responsibilities of everyday life take over without noticing it. This doesn’t happen because of neglect or indifference, but because modern life is built around constant motion. Deadlines pile up, calendars fill, commutes, drop-offs, and pickups blur together, and even the good habits we work hard to establish begin to crowd out everything else. Before long, you can be doing all the right things, checking all the boxes, and still feel like something important is slipping by just out of view.

The ice storm disrupted all of that in one stroke. With daycare closed and nowhere to be, my son and I were suddenly home together on Monday and Tuesday with the usual pace of life stripped away, while my wife, a nurse and very much an essential employee, still had to go in to work. For those two days, it was my son and me for most of the day. There was no rushing out the door, no glancing at the clock, no squeezing moments in between obligations. Instead, there was time.

We spent it playing, reading the same board books he insists on pulling from the shelf again and again, and sitting on the floor stacking blocks only to knock them down moments later. In the quieter moments, when nothing in particular was happening, I found myself simply watching him.

Two years ago, my son was little more than a small pink doll with no neck control, defined almost entirely by his needs and reflexes. Now he is unmistakably a person. He has preferences and opinions, frustrations and triumphs, and a growing desire to understand how the world around him works. He wants to show me things, wants to help, wants to be involved. His emotions are immediate and unfiltered, and his sense of pride when something clicks is impossible to miss. When life slows down enough for me to notice it, the transformation is something else.

That’s what’s easiest to lose sight of in the normal rhythm of parenthood. Not because we don’t care, but because life is loud. Parenthood exists alongside jobs, bills, expectations, and a culture that rewards efficiency and constant output. It’s easy, almost inevitable, to turn parenting into something you manage rather than something you experience. You get through the day, make sure everything is handled, and move straight into whatever comes next without realizing how much of the wonder happens in the in-between moments.

This week was a reminder that so much of the joy is found precisely there, in the unstructured time that produces nothing measurable and accomplishes nothing on paper. These are the hours that look, from the outside, like interruptions to real life, when in reality they are what give it meaning.

Yesterday, the roads had been cleared, daycare reopened, and work resumed. Life picked back up almost exactly where it left off, as it always does. I’m trying to hold onto the lesson a little longer than the ice lingered. The routines matter, and the structure matters, but they are not the point. Sometimes the best moments arrive when the schedule collapses and control slips just enough to let something better take its place.

These stretches of time, when you are fully present with the small person you’re responsible for raising, are not detours from real life. They are the thing itself.