Winter fun, finally

We finally got a decent snow. All morning yesterday we had freezing rain, then a bit of snow to top things off in the afternoon. We spent the day inside, wearing our jammies, listening to the little ticks of ice hitting the windows and skylight.

After so many days inside the house, this morning we went outside immediately after breakfast. It's been below freezing for several days so our humble little brook looks like this:


I've been kind of a neurotic mama about the kids getting wet this winter. It's not like the brook is more than ankle deep right now, and it's not like it would take more than 30 seconds to get the kids inside if they got wet. But I just can't help it. The snow was so hard and slippery that at one point today Napoleona had slipped down just onto the edge of the ice, and was getting scared that she couldn't climb back up. Somehow in that moment I was able to be calm and help her. Maybe because I had to actually take action instead of just brooding on my fears.

We've been having fun experiencing the different kinds of snow. We haven't had any this year, but last year we remember a few days with wet snowball-making snow. The snow this year has all been very powdery and dry, until this last storm which left us with very icy, crunchy hard-packed snow. The kids' feet hardly left marks as they walked, and I left big cracked indentations, much bigger than my actual feet. And because the surface was so slippery, the kids found that the path beside our neighbor's house made a perfect slide:


And shoveling and plowing such hard snow left piles of big snow chunks everywhere. So, there was much climbing and sliding down snow mountains and creating snow chunk sculptures.


Growing up in Southern California, I had absolutely no experience with snow or ice until after I was married and moved to the Sierra Nevadas. And it's only now that I'm coming to enjoy it alongside the kids. Certain grandparents (you know who you are!) grumble mightily about winter and look forward to moving to sunnier climes. For me, I love the variety of the seasons, and I wouldn't want my kids to miss these experiences as I did as a child.