Before the sun came out yesterday, we were fast approaching the three week mark for consecutive days with snow covering the ground. That may be the longest I've gone without seeing the grass in my entire life! Driving has been a nightmare--I have avoided it as much as possible. And it has been COLD. After the first snowfall on December 9th, the temperatures stayed low and five more inches of powder fell last Wednesday night (Dec14th), rewarding both Jeff and the kids with a day off school on Thursday. Jeff gave Jay a few lessons in the art of driveway shoveling, and Jay earned a little money clearing a path for our car. And of course we had to build snowmen and go sledding! With snow to spare, we even built an igloo.
SHOVELING: Jay worked so hard out there. It was the perfect job for Jay. It felt so valuable to let him work alone on a task that was simple, challenging, and measurable. Teaching kids how to do chores is hard work, and it seems to take a whole lot more guidance than I expect every single time--sometimes I feel like I'm interfering too much. With indoor chores like cleaning toilets and vacuuming, I have to check and guide and demonstrate and point out missed spots over and over. With snow shoveling, though, it was either shovel the snow off the driveway or don't--Jay could tell if he missed a spot without an adult standing over his shoulder. So we armed Jay with a shovel and turned him loose on the driveway. It was rewarding to watch him to work and struggle and sweat and finally succeed!
Jay refined his snow-shoveling technique as the week progressed.
Watching Jay at work.
SNOWMEN: On December 12th, Jeff had a snow day but Jay and Rose had school (on 2-hour delay), so Jeff and I took Amber outside to build snowmen while the bigs were in school. The second snowfall was marginally less-powdery than the first, so we managed to craft two snow-pile-men. Amber's "bippens" (mittens) were so thick that I got out Rose's old size 4 coat so we could cram her mittened hands/arms through the cuffs more easily. The sleeves slipped down still connected to the mittens and gave her extra long arms for hugging our snowmen. When she saw that we had put faces on our snowmen, she immediately started giving them hugs, nearly toppling the precarious powdery piles over in the process.
My snowman:
Amber's hands were about halfway up the sleeves.
Give the snowman a "tiss"
Jeff's snowman:
SLEDDING: December 15th snow day. The fresh 5 inches on top of the other two snowfalls made the snow so deep it kept getting in our boots when we hiked through the field to sled at the high school. The sleds even had trouble sliding down the fresh deep snow. I had to do a booty-scooty hop-slide on the saucer sled to pack down a path so Rose could slide down the hill instead of sinking and sticking. Grampa Dan's antique Beast of a sled handled the high-pile snow with finesse, like the classic it is. We tried sledding on cardboard too, with minimal success. And of course we got out our own mini-heirloom "sled"--the plastic box that we pulled Jay and Rose around in days of yore. The rope was still attached--we've used the box for storage with the rope still tied on for years.
Grampa Dan, circa 1950, on the same sled.
Amber and the original box sled--a ramshackle rite of passage for our kids.
A brief box "sled" history:
2 year-old Jay
1 year-old Rose
3 year-old Rose
Back to the present...
IGLOO: December 15th. We were only out sledding all together on Thursday for about 45 minutes before Amber needed to go warm up. Jeff took her inside and I stayed in the backyard with Jay and Rose to play a little longer. It seemed like a waste to go inside after such a short time in all of that deep snow! We decided to build an igloo, using our plastic box to pack snow-bricks. It actually worked! That powdery snow just needed a little beating and packing to form it into bricks, which I carefully dumped into a circular shape. We made at least 25 bricks for this igloo. It took forever! By the end, all three of us were wet and cold. The snow was too powdery to make a roof for our igloo, so we improvised with the baby pool. Jay and Rose thought it was pretty awesome, and I finally felt that we had adequately reveled in our snowy surplus. I do not have snow pants, so all of that snow brick packing, lifting, and dumping was done on my feet, crouching and standing over and over. Essentially I did about 2 hours worth of squats and let's just say I was feeling that workout all weekend.
Now this batch of snow is 75% melted and we are waiting for the inches forecast for Christmas. I have only experienced two or three white Christmases in my entire life, so even though we've had thick snow on the ground all month, the prospect of a fresh coat in time for Christmas is still exciting.
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