Snow day (part 2)

I suppose I should really start with the morning when I woke up at 8:00 to the sounds of someone clomping down the driveway. I glanced out the window and noticed that Mother Nature had not let us down—it had, in fact, snowed! And someone was probably coming to see if the kids could play.

So I hopped out of bed, threw on my housecoat, and rushed to wake the kids.

But, as it turns out, they woke up at the crack of dawn to head outside and it was them clomping up to their own house to get something. 

As Zoë put it, "My alarm went off at 7:35. We were outside by 7:40."

The rest of us were outside by 8:30, probably. And we enjoyed a lovely morning sledding with the neighbours, and building snowmen, chatting and chattering.

The kids went back out for round two in the afternoon, but I stayed inside to nap study (and, boy, was it a good study nap session). By this time it was sleeting more than snowing so most of the neighbours chose to stay inside, but one little neighbour and his mom came outside to play with the kids and I'm so glad they did because the mom had been too shy to try sledding when all the neighbours were out...but when it was just my kids out...she decided to give it a go (or three or four go's). 

The kids wanted to head back out for a walk after dinner. By this time we were mostly getting plain ol' frozen rain. See how all those drips are changing to icicles? Everything is covered in ice out there.

Here are Zoë and Alexander with the remnants of our snowman (he lost his balance in the afternoon):

Here's some lovely iridescent tree branches, shimmering like little rainbows in the light of my headlamp (because I have a knit hat that has a headlamp in it—very nice for taking strolls in the dark of winter evenings):

Every few feet Phoebe would throw herself on the ground to either lick the snow or take a big bite of it. It was kind of funny, although I don't know how many time I had to shriek, "DON'T EAT ROAD SNOW!" at her.

Here's Zoë with her "feather stick":

That's a lot of ice for one little stick to hold...we've heard the sound of many branches snapping off trees in the woods and crashing down to the ground below. Ice is heavy.

Here are some berries covered in ice:

And a frosty little pine tree:

Here are the kids stopping to try to make snow angels:

This would have been a better activity in the morning when the snow was fresh and fluffy. It was too crunchy this evening. Unfortunately, the only thing Phoebe wanted to do with the snow was eat it so she didn't think about snow angels very much. So she missed out this time around. 

Next time, Phoebe! (Whenever that will be).

When we got home, Andrew took Pheobe inside to get her ready for bed and read some stories. I stayed outside to sled with Benjamin, Zoë, and Alexander. Here's Alexander standing triumphantly on the remnants of our snowman—we used chunks from our snowman to make a ramp for our sledding course.

I have a few videos I might put up. My pictures didn't turn out very well in the evening light. But we had a lot of fun sledding together! You can perhaps see our little ramp in this picture, right in the middle of the kids:

When they first built it they made it very narrow and very tall—about a foot wide and probably a foot-and-a-half tall—and I was like, "What are you doing?! Do you want to die?"

These kids are not expert sledders (neither am I, but compared to them...my knowledge and experience is incredible). I mean, we live in the south. We are using boogie boards for sleds. We don't know how to steer those things! 

I helped them make the ramp wider (so we had a higher chance of actually hitting the ramp in the first place) and a little less high (our wipeouts were wild enough with the little air we got on our short ramp...I shudder to think what they would have been like had we been flinging ourselves multiple feet into the air). 

There are all kinds of obstacles at the bottom of the hill—the fence, the house, many, many trees—but this hill ends in the area where we rake all our leaves to. And the kids spent Wednesday and Thursday raking the leaves from the lawn to this very area (and they earned $30 raking the neighbour's yard as well...and then were sad that I didn't pay them for raking our yard)! So when we got to the bottom of the hill we could either dig our feet into the leaves to stop or just roll off the sled and into the leaves. It made for a very soft landing and no one crashed into anything (terribly hard). 

Everything was fine and dandy until we saw a power flash light up the sky with an eerie green colour. It happened over and over again—everything would go first black and then light up green. We kept sledding for a little while, but really the kids were getting quite frightened. 

"That's it! I'm going in," Alexander declared.

So we went inside...where the power kept flickering off. 

It must have gone out at least a dozen times...but it always came back on and is still on...so we're among the lucky ones who still have power. The longest it went out for was about a minute...so we're warm and cozy in our house. 

The kids are excited to go outside to play in the icy wonderland all day. 

Church was already canceled for Sunday, which I expected, looking at how much snow we got (2 whole inches!) and the forecast, which shows that we won't really get above freezing until Sunday afternoon (and must wait for the ice to melt away on its own, of course). 

The rage I once felt against southern reactions to winter storms has largely abated. I still think they overreact. For example, school was cancelled for Friday by Wednesday, and while I appreciate that this gives parents time to make alternate arrangements/plans for their kids/work, it feels really early to be cancelling school for potential weather (especially since there were many "snow days" in Durham where we played outside in t-shirts and hardly got a skiff of snow). But I also appreciate not sending people into the snow who simply don't know how to deal with it. 

And I really love how a good snow day brings the community together.

We get snow so rarely that nearly everyone in our neighbourhood was excited to get out in the snow first thing in the morning. We were sharing sleds (boogie boards, cardboard boxes, storage bin lids, and even an actual sled), winter gear, snowman decorations. We were throwing snowballs and zipping down hills. We were chatting and laughing and...it really is a chance to step out of ordinary time and into some sort of magical space where deadlines feel as frozen as the world around us. Who can worry about deadlines when there's snow fun to be had?!

We don't typically play this hard in the snow in places where it snows a lot because...snow days aren't fleeting. 

So I like that. 

Do I think it's ridiculous that church is already cancelled for Sunday? Yes, I do. It is Friday, people! 

But I'll just let them have this. It doesn't matter. 

I guess I feel like my schedule isn't being disrupted by the school district's call (that year we got nine snow days and then practically no spring break to make up for it—I was not happy about that!). Nowadays (and thanks in large part to the pandemic) many schools have "digital learning days" rather than "snow days" which means they don't have to make up time when school would have otherwise been canceled for snow. 

A recently retired teacher on our block said that when they had digital learning days on snow days the only assignment they'd give the kids would be to (1) go outside to enjoy the snow and then (2) write a little message to tell their teachers about what they did. 

And that officially counts as a day of school!

So taking a page from their book, we played in the snow all morning, came inside to warm up, dry our snow clothes, eat lunch, have our daily "math hour," and then bundled up to head back outside. We learned all about snow and the water cycle through natural observation and learned a little bit about physics through hard experience—what happens when you hit a brick with your sled? What happens when you make your snow ramp too high? What happens when you hit a patch of recently-solidified water while running as fast as you can on the wet asphalt?

We'll call it an official day of school.