A Snowy Sunday

We had a snowy Sunday. It snowed pretty much all day on Sunday. We stayed home from church due to Jeff's Covid making me paranoid at every scratchy throat and sniffle. When the snow started right around when we normally leave for church, I felt even better about our decision to all stay home. I strongly dislike driving in winter weather conditions, especially since our city does not plow the roads. So we had a cozy snowy Sunday at home together. Every time I looked out the window, I felt like I was living in a snow globe!

While the snow fell softly outside our window, Rose and Amber helped me address our Christmas cards. We turned on Tabernacle Choir Christmas music while we worked. We mailed 60 cards this year, so not a huge number, but still a hefty amount to do all at once. We divided up the addresses and went to work writing on the envelopes. Amber wrote six addresses before taking a lunch break. Rose wrote close to 20. I did the rest. Amber and Rose both enjoyed stamping the return address onto the envelopes, tucking the cards in, sticking stamps on, and sealing the envelopes shut. In fact, when Rose and I took a lunch break, Amber had all but finished stamping, stuffing, and sealing the envelopes when we came back! Rose jumped in and helped Amber with the last few envelopes. It was the easiest, most pleasant Christmas card prep I've ever done.

"This is fun," Rose commented as we carefully wrote addresses.

"Doing menial tasks is always more fun with a group. It's one of the basic principles of the entire Relief Society organization!" I replied. 

After we finished our Christmas card-a-thon, we thought the snow looked thick enough for some exploration. Amber was all for ice skating again, but it ended up being too snowy for ice skating--we shoveled the driveway and it promptly got completely covered up in snow again while we were outside. So we decided to wait to shovel the canal ice until it stopped snowing. 

Instead, we attempted to make a snowman (he turned out very tiny). The snow was slightly packable, but we could not get snowballs to roll up bigger. Amber contented herself with packing a very dense firm snowball while Rose and I labored to make our 18 inch snowman stay upright. Eventually we decided on sledding as our snowy activity of choice. We hiked all over the fields behind our house in search of a good hill. We know that area very well, so we knew where the hills were. They were much steeper in our minds, though, and the snow wasn't quite thick enough for good sledding anyways. 

We did a fair amount of very sedate sledding, punctuated by much hand-hopping to propel the sled forward. Once again I was reminded that sledding is a kids activity. I do lots of yoga and consider myself a relatively fit adult, but bumping down a hill on a piece of plastic and then climbing off of the little sled at the end were both inordinately difficult. I bruised my knee and tweaked my glute! After a few sledding attempts that threatened my musculoskeletal structure, I contented myself with watching Rose and Amber sled. I was so tired by the end of it, I thought I was coming down with Jeff's sickness. But so far it was just me being tired from hiking and sledding in the snow. 

Since it was snowing hard the whole time we were outside, our hats and coats were wet and coated in snow. It felt wonderful to come inside our warm house after our 90 minutes out in the cold wet.

Christmas card workshop: child labor at its finest.

Snowballs!

Our baby snowman kept crumbling every time Rose tried attaching eyes or hair.

Sledding time: we FLY down this hill on scooters, but sleds were so slow!

The rows of grape vines looked neat in the snow.

One of the hills we tried was steep enough for a good sled ride, but it shot us out into the rows of grape vines. We had to look for an alternative hill because Amber kept crashing into the actual grape vines and I didn't want to destroy them.

So wet and snowy!