Snopacalypse 2019

Five days after the first fun snowfall things got crazy.  It snowed and snowed and snowed. By the end it had snowed about 2 1/2 feet and the girls missed almost 2 weeks of school.  We were totally trapped in our house for about a week.  

After the first heavy dumping of snow we layered up and trudged up the bus stop hill with inflatable pool rings to use as sleds.  Most of the kids who we see at the bus stop had had the same idea and there was quite a crowd at the top and already a well packed route going down the middle of the otherwise unusable street.  It was so much fun.  Although Leona had to be convinced to go down the first time she didn't have to be convinced the next 20 times.  Timothy fell asleep in the carrier and slept through his trip down the hill on the sled.  The kids had so much fun sledding.  We did it for a few hours the first day and went back again the next day, but by then things had iced over a bit and it wasn't as fun of a ride.

The kids did pretty well considering the fact that by the end of it all they were cooped up in our small house for 3 weeks (The two weeks off for snow immediately preceded the mid-winter break of school.). We did a lot of hot chocolate, a few movies, lots of the girls playing in the snow out front while Timothy and I watched from the window.  We tried to build an igloo but weren't ultimately successful with that enterprise.  The snow plows eventually came but they didn't go all the way to the end of the court so we ended up having to borrow snow shovels and digging our driveway out ourselves.  We had tried to drive to piano lessons before everything was plowed, but that was a bad idea.  The minivan felt like a ship that was rocking and floating along on the water driving out of the court and then the side streets were so bad that we had to let Eliza off at piano and go park at Costco half a mile away.  There was nowhere closer to park because the snow was piled up so high on the sides of the roads.  Eliza slipped and fell a couple of times scrambling down the steep hill to her piano teacher's house.  

We felt like arctic explorers holed up waiting for reinforcements after that, because we didn't leave the house until the snow had thawed significantly. While I'm not in a hurry to do it again, the kids would love it and it was a fun experience.