Snow Day!

I hate snow pants.

I hate gloves.

I hate hats and coats and wooly things of all kinds.

Also, I'm rapidly becoming convinced that I hate the snow.

Boots I'm giving a tentative pass, but they should watch it; I may rescind that at any point.

In other news, we had a lot of snow yesterday, snow which is still on the ground and making me feel twitchy about things.

My school was cancelled, and Margaret and Ellie were off anyway because of President's Day.  My plan for the day was that we would spend it calmly inside, in quiet, decorous indoor pursuits, like building block castles which we would then immediately clean up, and having tea parties with toy elephants, and reading stories.

Ellie, who is recovering from a nasty cold, was on board with this idea, but Margaret wanted to spend all day out in the snow.  Ellie wanted to spend all day indoors.  This was the source of some tension.  I think I spend all day putting on and taking off other people's snow pants.

It was, however, enjoyable once we were out, and before anyone decided that they were freezing.

Ellie took on shoveling the already-shoveled walk.  She did a good job, too, once she got started.  She was very grateful to me that I was willing to share my shovel with her, and also very angry that I wasn't willing to let her shovel the stairs with an adult-sized shovel.  I managed to convince her that she should stay outside even if she wasn't going to be allowed to fall down the steps, but she was rather sniffly after that point.

Margaret came out to sled and sledded with a will.  Not with very much sense of self-preservation, because after a while she got the snow packed hard and slick enough that she was sliding out into the street.  I put a stop to it, first by standing at the bottom of the hill and blocking her, and then when my shins began to feel bruised, by confiscating her sled.  She didn't see the point in this.

She was not pleased with her sledding being curtailed, so I hauled one screaming (Margaret) and one sadly whimpering (Ellie) child into the house, where I stripped them down and threw their clothes into the dryer.  I coveted my mother's ground-floor utility room at that moment, or our neighbor's basement laundry/mud room, which put the taking off of the clothes and the snow in the same place as the dryer.  Luckily for Margaret, Leo took her sledding on a big hill after work, so that worked out for her.  I was rather glad to get back to work today, where I am not responsible for preventing frostbite.