Snow Day '10

We woke up Thursday morning to a winter wonderland, right here in Good Old "Not Cold" Dallas. Alex looked out the window at the big fat snowflakes falling down and announced, "it's winter!!". He then spent the next ten minutes gazing out into the yard, saying "it's beeeeauuuuutiful!" followed by, "I want to go play in the snow!".

So we bundled up, and by 7:30am, we were freezing our patooties off in the backyard full of fresh white powder.

We quickly realized that this snow packed like nobody's business, so we set off to build Alex's first snowman. We started in the backyard, built the snowman's body, and realized that we should have built our man on the front porch where passersby could appreciate him. And how does one relocate a snowman from the backyard to the front porch? By carrying it through the house, of course.

We made it to the porch, but not without grabbing some essential snowman-building paraphernalia along the way. We had originally planned on giving our man "traditional" snowman body parts, but after we grabbed a carrot for his nose, we decided our snowman had a sense of humor and opted to steal Mr. Potato Head's parts instead.

We had been outside for quite a while by this point, and A has a much higher tolerance for cold than I do, so I kept trying to bribe him back inside by promising blueberry muffins and juice. He refused for a while and kept saying, "I want to play in the snow ONE.MORE.TIME!!" until finally he had had enough. He suddenly shoved his snowman over, stepped over his cold, dead body, and said "I want muffins now".

We ended up going to the grocery store to get muffins and donuts because the bakery at our little ol' Tom Thumb has better muffins than Corner Bakery, La Madeleine, and Breadwinners could ever hope to have. Give me a blueberry muffin, a cup of coffee (1/3 caffeine Maxwell House International Cafe French Vanilla Coffeehouse Beverage, to be specific), and a laptop and I could die happy. Alex, however, would forego muffins and coffee and computers for one delicious chocolate-glazed donut, and you better believe he will enjoy it all the way up to his eyeballs.

Lest ye think that's the end of my Snow Day story, this was only Part 1 of what turned out to be an epic saga of snow-related tales. After naptime, Alex wanted to go back outside to play in the snow again, and as much as I would have preferred to cuddle up on the couch in a Snuggie, with a muffin in one hand, a Coffeehouse Beverage in the other, and a computer on my lap, I ended up back out in the wet, cold snow to watch Alex have the time of his life. He discovered that, although the sand in his sand table was no longer "sandy", it was just as fun to scoop up wet, sludgy sand as it was to scoop the dry stuff. Plus, playing in the sludgy stuff gave him an excuse to make his "yucky" face.

He worked really hard to fill his golf bag to the top with icy sand, but the task proved to be too tedious, even for him. Oh, and you may notice that he ditched his mittens at some point along the way because they had gotten completely wet when he dipped his hands in a wagon full of water (that, and I think I heard him mutter something about mittens being for sissies).

He stayed outside for over an hour, and by that time I had eased my way from the porch to the kitchen, where I could cook dinner and toast my buns next to the warm oven while keeping an eye on A (who, by the way, still seemed completely oblivious to the fact that the temperature was below freezing). He eventually came in and I convinced him to take a bath to warm up, hoping we might be able to avoid a bout with hypothermia or a case of frostbite. Crisis averted - he went to bed that night with all of his extremities intact.

The snow did not let up at all over the next twenty-four hours, which resulted in Dallas having the biggest single-day snowfall in its history. BIGGEST SNOWFALL. Like, EVER, in the WHOLE ENTIRE HISTORY OF DALLAS. We ended up getting over 8 inches of snow, and Tim wisely chose to work from home on Friday. Wise, but not so convenient since our power was in and out all day. Plus, MDO was canceled, so I didn't get any work done for my Etsy shop because "having Alex around" and "getting work done" are mutually exclusive. Not that I could have gotten much done anyway. Do you know how hard it is to run an internet-based business without the internet? Turns out it's darn near impossible. Who knew...?

Our power only went off in short bursts until about 7 o'clock Friday night, right after the sun had gone down. A was in the living watching TV when the lights went out, and he did not take the outage lightly. Poor thing - I got to him in seconds, but he just kept crying and repeating, "It's dark! It's dark!". He calmed down pretty quickly when he realized that he got to use the flashlight. The four of us spent the next hour or so sitting on our bed - Murphy lying around, Alex making laser light shows on our walls and ceiling, and Tim and I trying to decide whether we would freeze to death if we stayed in the house that night without any heat. Luckily, the power came back on around 8:30pm. We were SO relieved and suddenly so much more appreciative of that guy who invented electricity. I really love that guy.

So, by the end of Snowstorm '10, here's what we were looking at:

Not too bad, just a few branches down, and by today most of it has completely melted away. It was fun while it lasted...I'm just glad it didn't last very long.