The Most Amazing Snowman

Since we live in an area that rarely gets snowfall we were pretty excited to see the couple of inches that fell this day and took advantage by making snow angels and building a snow man.  This was the little one's first snowman and he was more interested in clearing the snow off the swingset than building the snowman.   The day afer this we got about six more inches of snow.  The boys kept checking out the window to see if the snowman was okay.  At one point he had fallen over and we went out and rebuilt him.  After the snow came the ice followed by several days of rain.  Eveything was a slushy mess and in a few days there were almost no traces left of the wintery weather.

We watched as our snow man slowly melted away.  It was sad to watch him go and my oldest suggested we bring some of the snow into the freezer to save it for another day.  I did manage to talk him out of that.  We enjoyed our winter adventures and last Friday we had a sunny day (it was 40 degrees) and we went to the park to play with our friends.

The Ice Storm

This day was crazy.  I've never seen an ice strom before and when we woke up this morning there was a thick layer of ice on everything.  The power lines had a layer as thick as these plants.  The weight of the ice eventually caused some of our tree branches to break off and when it started to melt the ice made huge crashing noises as it fell onto our roof and yard.  Despite how crazy dangerous it was it was really quite beautiful.  It was so still that morning and everything was shimmering.  Our front yard looked like an ice rink (not that we tried it out) and our care was also covered in about 1/4 inch layer of ice.

These flowers were some of the strangest of what I saw.  I'm not sure what kind they were but they looked almost like a daisy and the ice balled up on the end of them until there was more ice there than flower.  It's pretty amazing that such a phenomenon exists. 

There was one snap dragon plant (yes I still have snap dragons in January, crazy, I know) that had some blossoms on it and it looked so strange cased in ice.

I guess the lesson in this one is to enjoy the beauty even in the craziest of circumstances.  As a cause of the ice storm over 200,000 people lost power and some were out for as long as five days.  Many are still cleaning up fallen trees and branches from their property and Matt said the wood recycling place had a long line when he went on Saturday.  Me, I'm just glad to have power again and am appreciating it a little more.

Weathering the Storm

Our area was hit by snow, ice, wind and rain last week and we were out of power for four days.  We spent most of that time at my uncle's house which was really fun.  On top of the weather issues I had a bad stomach flu that held on forever.  It's been nice to get back to "normal" at our house though I throughly enjoyed having a change of scenery for a few days.  A big thanks to all the friends and family that checked up on us and those who helped out with the yard clean up from the tree branches that fell from our trees.  I have some amazing pictures from the ice storm but will have to get my camera back before I can share them.