First Snow Day of 2016

By Thursday night, all the schools were declared closed on Friday due to an impending snow and ice storm. We woke up Friday morning (after sleeping in), to the sound of sleet. After a relaxed breakfast, Alice and I did an art project where we cut out colorful shapes and glued them into a picture, based on a children's book about Henri Matisse that we had read the night before. Well, that's what I did, anyway. Alice just sort of cut and colored and glued stuff randomly.

Sera's art - It is surprisingly satisfying to do this.

By 11am, there was enough sleet and snow on the ground to warrant bundling everyone up and heading outside. We were curious about how Simon would do, since last year he hated the snow. He did OK, mainly due to his new-found ability to keep his mittens on for more than 45 seconds.

We pulled the kids on the sleds to the park, where Alice very firmly declared that she did not want to sled into the bushes like last year.

The kids had fun just putzing around the park. Simon asked for his dump truck, which we had not brought. At one point, he went down the slide and got a belly full of snow. He really liked swinging, but his legs were a little exposed and the tops of the boots had collected snow.

Alice went sled riding several times down the hill. She was a lot more into it this year than last year, where she had preferred to just run down the hill.

Simon held up pretty well until he wanted some gummies, and I gave him some, and he took off his mittens to eat them, and then his fingers got too cold, and he cried all the way home.

Alice and I stopped by S-Mart on our way home to get some eggs and bananas. It was fun to pull some groceries home on the sled--it felt very primitive.

The morning burned up so much energy, that Simon eagerly ate all of his spaghetti for lunch and then had room for a giant chocolate chip cookie.

After naps, Alice wanted to go out again, so I stayed home with Simon while Zac took Alice on a walk to the neighborhood pond. The pond was not frozen, but they did have fun building an ice-ball snowman on the way back.