We've been securely wedged into an extreme atmospheric condition that doesn't want to relent. Night-time lows are, like last night, around minus-26-degrees Celsius, rising to around minus-17 in the afternoon. At one time that would never stop us from venturing out for a vigorous ravine walk. We would stick Button and Riley's little feet into winter boots and forge ahead. Jack and Jill, not yet four months old, are another story altogether. We could just leave them secure in their playpen and go out ourselves without them, but the temptation to do just that is too waveringly weak.

The cold, along with the wind whipping about make it too unattractive. Besides which, we reason, just everyday activities around the house and venturing out in spurts give us some kind of energy expenditure; yesterday it was me cleaning the house top to bottom, and my husband clearing away the snow that fell most of the day, shovelling it from the walks front and back of the house, and blowing out the driveway.

Protecting those little black tramps from their own insatiable curiosity and drive to chew everything they can find, is a job in and of itself. We've put up cardboard barricades in vulnerable places where electrical cords seem irresistible to them, and outside in the backyard, we've had to place pieces of wood to keep them from chewing at the woody vines and protruding pieces of perennial stalks that they uncover at the margins of the gardens. Everything is fodder for their chewing mania. In fact, it is Jill whose fixation on chewing everything in sight who presents as more of a challenge than her brother.

Yesterday evening, alerted to the fact that she was chewing vigorously at something small, we opened her reluctant jaw to find a rough piece of glass the size of a flattened peanut. I'd earlier seen her scrabbling madly under narrow bottom edge between the dishwasher and the floor. As much as I mop and wash the floors, a piece of glass that we had missed from having broken something months earlier remained, and she had used her clever little paws to somehow dislodge it from where it had securely lodged itself, defying our knowledge of its presence.

Jack and Jill wrestling over possession of a chewing potential

She's persistent and indefatigable in her search for chewing objects. The little rawhide chew-knots that we've given them as alternates to the flat chewies presented a conundrum to her at first but she soon became adept at chewing them swiftly to pieces, finding much satisfaction there, but there's a reasonable limit to how much she can be allowed to ingest, and we keep them to a discreet minimum.

Yesterday I gave them a few strips of fresh red bell pepper and a few slender green beans to chew on, and they were gone in an instant. We'll be glad when their baby teeth are gone and their mature teeth replace them.