Old Man Winter

We woke up to this lovely sight on Christmas Morning!

Tonight after we tucked our kids safely into their warm beds, I turned on the news to check out the weather for the remainder of the week. Rumor has it, we are in for one COLD weekend! Yep. The news guys confirmed that arctic air and snow is on it's way. Then after that, the windchill factor is going to be well below zero going into the weekend. Brrrrrr!!! And that's an understatement!

Old Man Winter does not like the Midwest. It seems like I remember Utah winters having fluffy pretty snow, and not being quite so.....bone chilling/miserable/I never want to leave my house/cold. I've never experienced cold like this! It's amazing. You walk outside and you are immediately chilled right to the bone. Even sitting in the house I am cold---I am always cold. Cold. Cold. Cold.

So in honor of all the...you know what....(COLD) I am going to post our day after Christmas sledding pictures.

There is a perfect sledding hill that never gets used at our old apartments, so the day after Christmas we decided to hit the slope. I went to buy us a sled and a shovel (after the van got stuck in the driveway and the neighbors shoveled me out!) and had to go to three different stores because they were either out of sleds or didn't stock them here in KS--it just never snows enough! Finally I found these tubes at Target--we got some wicked speed.

I think it took us 45 minutes to get everyone dressed and out the door, and we probably spent 20-30 minutes actually sledding.

Little Owen wanted nothing to do with the sleds, and his hands froze in his gloves so he ended up back in the car with grandma pretty quick!

Reese was truly our Snow Princess. All she wanted to do was flit and float around in the flakes. She was really nervous about going on the tubes so we decided not to push her....until I got this brilliant idea to trick her. I'm so mean! I sat on the tube at the top of the hill and asked her to come give me a push---then I grabbed her and shoved off down the hill. She screamed a terrible scream the entire way down!

She was so mad at me! This was all the traumatized girl wanted to do afterwards:

Sledding is one sport that is not for the weary! Walking back up those blasted hills is the worst part! Since we chose a rather large hill, the kids wore out pretty fast. Dad was a good sport and would run down and carry back up the tubes and occasionally a kid. This photo is my favorite from the day---both Ally and Brayden are collapsed in the snow at the bottom of the hill while Don trudges back up with the tubes. haha!

He got a good workout that day!!