Yay! A Snow Day!

Hang on to your hats, this one is a long one. Mother nature made up the small dusting / teasing of snow we had yesterday by dumping a fair amount last night. It wasn't a huge amount, but it was enough to close schools and provide for some dangerous road conditions. Since we're off a street that's off a main street our road never really gets plowed, so rather than fight my way in I decided to work from home. This has positives and negative. The negative (or positive depending on how you view it I suppose) is I didn't really get a full day of work in, but I did get to enjoy being outside with the kids in the snow.


It wasn't what I call packing snow. But it was good enough for sledding.


The kids really wanted to build a snowman and snow fort, but the snow just wasn't cooperating at all.


So we concentrated on sledding. Which required some finesse since the area where they sled was packed with the cut up leftover trees that fell down during last year's ice storm. There was a moment where I thought Quinn was going run into them so I planted myself and bounced his sled to the side. Unfortunately I'm not so good at planting myself and I ended up getting flipped head over heels. Somehow I managed to keep my camera in the air and kept it from taking a hit.


And sadly while Ginger filmed some of the day's events she didn't get Quinn running me over on tape (I believe her and Catherine were still in the front yard at that point).


Ginger had bought the kids some new sleds. They're basically little pieces of plastic you sit on ride. I personally don't think they work that well, but the kids insisted on continuing to try and use them.


Unfortunately most of the pictures I took ended up being worthless because once again I had changed the settings on my camera. Back in Richmond on Saturday to take a picture of the bell tower in the evening I had set the EV setting to +0.7 and never changed it back. So all my shots were trying to be slightly overexposed which was keeping the shutter open for way longer than it should have (and by way longer I means an additional 20 or 30 milliseconds, but that's all it takes to make all your shots a bit blurry).




After a mini snowball battle between Ginger and the kids Quinn decided he was done and wanted to go inside to get some hot chocolate.


Catherine didn't want to go in yet, so I took her down the street to a larger hill. This particular hill is huge, but has a creek with a plethora of rocks in it at the bottom, so taking the inflatable sled wasn't an option since it would have probably ended up in the rocks. This meant we actually had a use for the new sled Ginger bought. So while I'm bashing it on the one hand, it was good we had it in this case.




The hill has a path on it (not that you can see it since it's covered in snow) and lots of kids were sliding down it. I was briefly worried she was going to crack her head on the snow covered asphalt, but she never got too much speed going so I decided it was probably safe enough. Catherine would have stayed out there and continued to sled even longer if I hadn't finally made her leave. But, and this was the kicker, she was too tired to walk back (even though I had offered multiple times to drive us there initially she insisted on us walking). So I ended up having to carry her all the way home by giving her a piggy back ride on my shoulders.