Saturday, December 24, 2016

Snowy Days Are Here Again

We've gotten about a foot of snow in the last week from a record-breaking storm, and the temperatures have been cold enough to keep it around. (The first few snow days were all followed up by rain days, which melted all of the accumulated snow pretty quickly.) But the last day of school was the biggest snow day of all! It's made for pretty, snow-covered trees, but the roads have been a mess until just recently because it's been too cold for even the road salt to work.

Anyhow, the kids had fun trying to find the curb after helping shovel the sidewalk,

And making fresh tracks across the pristine yard. Can you tell that Owen still enjoys falling and rolling around in the snow?

When it's 10 degrees F outside, sometimes I supervise through the window!

It's been so cold that even the cat, Tibbs, has been requesting fires in the fireplace. She shows up whenever someone is on the floor by the fireplace in hopes that it will be turned on. What a pampered, lazy creature!

The kids have been sledding nearly every day. We've joined them a few times, but it's nice that they can go a few houses down to a hill all by themselves now, too! We've tried just about every combination of family members on our one sled. I think Santa may be bringing us a new one this year!

Sometimes we don't even need a sled to have fun! The snow is just too dry to really make any snowballs or snowmen without adding water and strategy though. That leaves just some good, old-fashioned family snow wrestling... 

We acquired some cross-country skis (or country skis as Hadley calls them) this year, since Owen enjoyed doing that last year. We've already gotten out a couple of times, and it's been very enjoyable!

Owen brought a friend one time, and after doing the loop around the park, they did some climbing on the park fountain. I was a little nervous, since they were wearing their ski boots, but they had no issues at all and were like little mountain goats up there.

Hadley has some little ones that strap on to her snow boots too, so we could go as a family. It's so nice that we can do this in the city parks, just a short drive from home!




In other news, we continued the annual tradition of seeing a local production of the Nutcracker. This time Hadley joined us! She's been a twirling snowflake at home ever since, although she was dozing through most of Act II. It was especially fun since the kids have been studying the Waltz of the Flowers in their music class. They did their puppet show along with the music during the ballet. So cute!

Hadley performed in her school program one evening. Unfortunately, she was in the back row, so I didn't get a good picture, but we did squeeze another year out of her Santa-esque dress. Between the school and church programs, she's picked up a lot of new songs, most notable is the one in which she cheerfully sings, "Halle-moon-ya!" (She's also been enjoying practicing her lowercase letters over the break.)

One morning, we took in the Christmas exhibit at the museum. The kids had a blast dressing up in pioneer gear in the children's area. Fingers crossed in that we haven't seen any lice yet from the coonskin cap that he wore for half an hour!

Finally, I'll leave you with handsome Owen in his new birthday sweater. Happy holidays!

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