Snow Days

As you all know, we got some snow in Chicago. Frankly, the "blizzard" just wasn't nearly as bad as I had expected. It snowed for less than 24 hours, and today was mostly sunny and not too cold. Our entire block was out chatting and laboring with their shovels - it was very friendly and small-town-ish, with lots of neighbors stepping in to shovel for those who were either absent, ill, or too lazy to do it themselves. I'm telling myself that this counts as the workout I couldn't make it to the gym for.




I don't think I've ever experienced 20 inches of snow before. As you can see, some of the drifts were up past Miles' waist and Eleanor's chest. I saw a suggestion for building a snow fort: shovel up a five-foot-high mountain of snow, hollow it out, and pour water all over it to help it freeze solid and not collapse. You can also "paint" it with squirt bottles of water and food coloring. I would kind of like to do this...and then the thought of shoveling that much snow into a pile and what, crawling on my knees to dig out the inside?...sounds really unappealing.



This is the view from inside our garage. Which I am, again, truly grateful for. But there's no way we're getting our car out anytime soon; that opening is 8 feet high, so that tells me the drifts are two, maybe three feet. I have no idea how long it'll take for our alley to be passable; it has speed bumps, so I don't think it can be plowed, and there's just nowhere to PUT the snow after you shovel it, you know?

OK, bad-mommy-moment confession: Eleanor does not have snow boots. Miles has the pair I mistakenly bought two years ago, size 10 mismarked as size 7, and which I made him wear at age 2...and age 3...and now age 4. Eleanor has galoshes, which I figured were good enough, with some thick socks. Well, they're not. First, one boot got stuck in a drift and fell off, so her sock got soaked. She didn't want to go inside, so I dumped the snow out of the boot, put the wet sock back on, and the boot on top of it. She was happy. But then her glove came off and she started complaining about her cold hand. When we went inside, I couldn't pull off her OTHER boot. I looked inside, and it was completely packed full of snow. I could not get her foot out; it was jammed and frozen in there. I finally lifted her into the kitchen sink and ran lukewarm tap water into her boot until her foot got loosened up. Yes, I am the urban mom whose children are going to get frostbite, I guess. If you can get frostbite in 15 minutes. Poor girl.

I have to say, spending most of June in Tanzania is sounding SUPER right about now!