My love/hate relationship with snow days. . .

We had a beautiful snowy day today. Casey was up at 7:15, so we came downstairs for quiet time so we wouldn't wake the other two kiddos. I looked outside and saw these huge, gorgeous flakes falling, and they were actually sticking. Everything looked so fresh. Here is a little video of the snow falling in our backyard. It was so peaceful and pretty!


I love snowy days because we had sooo many of them when I was kid in western Pennsylvania and I have many childhood memories of white Christmases, school closings, and dangerous sled-riding activities from my childhood. We don't get anywhere near enough snow here in Northern Virginia to qualify as a respectable winter. I feel like my kids are being cheated out of a set of "real" winter memories to bring them laughs later in life. We do our best to take full advantage of any snowfall we do get here. We snowshoe, sledride, and generally run amok in the white stuff whenever we get the chance. I also love snowy days because the lighting is usually perfect to get great kid pictures, and the fresh snow makes for a clean, bright backdrop. Here are a few I took today:










I hate snowy days because in order to get those cute pictures of my kids, I had to dress all three of them in layers, then snow pants, coats, hats, and the most-hated. . . ski gloves. They are damn near impossible to put on, as far as I can tell. Someone should invent a machine to properly install a kid's hands into these suckers. And as usual, as soon as we got outside, Casey found a reason to take his gloves off, which meant I had to chase him around trying to get them back on, which meant he fell and stuck his bare hands in the snow, which meant he was immediately ready to come back in the house. . . I hate ski gloves. I have no photos or videos to properly document the hassles of dressing 3 kids in snow gear, but it's probably for the best as I'm sure I let at least one itsy bitsy profane word slip out during the process!