If you haven’t heard, we had an inch of snow fall yesterday. Big, fluffly flakes fell much of the afternoon, making it seem like we were anywhere except for on the Gulf Coast. Our local paper really put it well, saying that here we are used to unusual weather patterns that are accompanied by a person’s first name…But snow? Never! Even funnier is that it seems we have beaten many other snow cities to their first snow - Chicago, all of the northeast…Wow!

The kids wasted no time in enjoying what they could. I realized of course, the shortcomings of “winter gear” available to the kids here. Some observations:

• None of their “cold clothes” are waterproof. Being in a wet snowfall got very soggy, very quickly.
• Snow boots - what snow boots? The best I could do was extra socks and rain boots. But at least their feet stayed dry!
• Mittens - these are for show only. Cute but much to short - they were the perfect length to trap the snow between their bare wrist and their jacket cuff. How effective!

These flaws didn’t seem to bother the kids at all, though. Snowballs were made…

…snowflakes were tasted…

…and lots of crunching of boots and general tromping around. After a while though, the soggy clothes beat them and they came inside to warm up. Waking up the next morning, it looked like there was enough left to still play in. So we rushed through breakfast to try and make it out before the sun hit the grass and started melting everything away.

Sadly, the snow on the ground had turned to the consistency of crushed ice - it was kinda like playing with the stuff that comes out your refrigerator door into your drinking glass. But the ladies soldiered on, doing their darndest to enjoy what was there. Here, Sophie lowers her expectations of making a snowman to “…hey Mom, I’m going to make a…a PILE!”. So pitiful!

No, really. *This* is pitiful. Crushed ice angels. And still, they don’t care. They were laughing and giggling the whole time!

Finally, we decided to embrace the icy leftovers and started putting “icebergs” in the pool. This quickly devolved into the girls scooping pool water with their mittens on, and then flapping them around to flick water at each other. Sigh. I guess if you can’t have a snowball fight you might as well have a splash one.

And…when we came back inside, the first thing out of Sophie’s mouth was:

“Can we go swimming?”

Ah. Winter in Texas. Nothing like it!

The rest of November after my last post was pretty simple — another birthday for dear Maddie…

…with monkey balloons and…feathered headbands? Mad’s birthday happened to fall on the same date as her school’s Thanksgiving feast, so we had a whole mix of stuff going on.

As Maddie turned six, a little over a week later…

…I turned, well, a little more than six. There wasn’t enough room for all the candles! Sophie didn’t think the cake was fancy enough so she decided to color it with all the sprinkle colors we have. We can always count on her for that extra bit of flash!