Cold Snap & Hat Game

It has been very cold here for the past several days. That might not surprise you if, like I used to, you imagine Moscow to have the same weather as the coldest parts of Siberia. But actually, Moscow isn’t all that cold, particularly in comparison to the places where I’ve spent a lot of my life. It’s on average only slightly colder than New York City, about the same as Madison (Wisconsin), and totally balmy compared with interior Alaska. At any rate, we’ve had a real cold snap here the past few days, with temperatures in the negative numbers the whole time, and aside from commuters it seems like everyone is staying inside.

One consequence of this is that we’ve had to work a little harder to entertain and exhaust our budding toddler (note: no one told us this phase would come so quickly!). Among other new games, I’ve introduced “choose your own hat,” an activity that entails Arturo (you guessed it) choosing his own hat. It sounds simple, but it can suck up a good 20 or 30 minutes, sometimes more if I give him a lot of options. And how do I decide when the game is over? Either Arturo becomes totally engrossed with one hat or loses interest all together (in which case I select the last hat he pawed, sucked on, whatever). Below are some of his most recent selections. Stay tuned for “choose your own socks,” “choose your own mittens,”… :-)