Snow Day!

Amelia's school was cancelled as early as yesterday afternoon, and I'm so glad they didn't make everyone try and drive in this weather.  We have 11" of snow already, and the blizzard warning just started!  As soon as Amelia woke up, she wanted to go play outside, but I made her wait until later in the morning to see if the wind would stop and the snow would die down (it didn't).  In front of our screen door, the snow had drifted almost up to Megan's waist!

Megan wasn't a fan of standing in or playing in the snow, and she especially hated the sled.  But she did love eating the snow!  She ate that huge snowball all the way down to a little ball.

Amelia, on the other hand, loved sledding all by herself.  It was hard and slow going for her, since the snow was so deep and so heavy, and she was the first one sledding.  She eventually got a pretty curvy track made where she could build up some speed.  But she tipped over a lot, too!

And she had to stop every time to grab a bite of snow:

I told them we'd go back outside after naptime to make a snowman, since this is perfect snowman snow. 

Playing Hooky.... again

Oh dear, we played hooky twice in the same week... good thing it's just 4-year-old preschool!  This time the girls and I drove down to visit Grandma and Grandpa Dueber so we could go downtown to see the Christmas windows at Marshall Fields (stupid Macy's).  This time, Grace spent the night at Grandma and Grandpa's house, too, which was a special treat for Amelia because she got to share a bedroom with Grace.  Grace said that she woke up at about 6:30am, but Amelia didn't wake up until about 6:40.  All I know is that when I woke up around 7, I could hear Amelia talking a mile a minute to Grace.

As always, the kids were excited to ride the train.  There was a lot of seat switching early on, because everyone seemed to want to have a window all to themselves while also getting to sit next to Grace or Grandma.  And we even remembered to get off at Lake, so we could walk right into the basement of Macy's.  Not like last year, when we got off a stop late...  oops.

The windows were a lot nicer than last year.  Natalie and Megan were particularly interested in watching the moving pieces.

 

Megan was excited to ride the escalators again!

We liked the Christmas tree in the Walnut room, too, it was decorated with silver and gold stars.  We didn't eat underneath it this year.  Next year, let's remember to go get our pagers as soon as we get to Macy's!  Mom bribed the kids with a piece of candy cane to get them to look at the camera and smile.

Then we stopped to write Christmas letters to Santa.  Megan colored her letter very intently, while Amelia drew pictures of Tinkerbell and a jumprope and then wrote a short letter to Santa, with a lot of help from me.  I think Natalie colored six letters!

 

Megan was so tired on the ride home that she fell asleep on Grandma's lap.

I hope we can go downtown again next year!

Playing Hooky

We pulled Amelia out of preschool on Tuesday to go to Chula Vista indoor waterpark in the Dells.  It was so much fun to be inside swimming and playing while it was snowing outside.  Amelia said "This is so much fun!  Now that you know that I like this, we should come here all the time!"  I wish we could!

We had the waterpark almost all to ourselves, which was fantastic.  We spent most of our time in the tot pool, which had warm water that was only 2 feet deep at the deepest, and had two different water slides and lots of spouting fountains to play with.  Amelia went down the blue waterslide over and over again:

Neither girl wanted to try standing under the buckets of water, but they thought it was so funny when Daddy would get a bucket dumped on his head:

Amelia figured out that she could aim the water fountains, and she enjoyed trying to hit Grandpa:

Megan liked to splash and kick at the edge of the pool and "swim like a fishy" (walk on her hands) in the shallow parts.

After we'd played in the tot pool for a while, we convinced the girls to get in the deeper pool (4 feet at the deepest).  Amelia wanted to wear a life jacket, and she was pretty comfortable paddling back and forth between the adults without holding onto anybody.  We also tried out the lazy river (the girls did not really like it):

And the kids refused to try out any of the bigger water slides; they were too small for the big ones, and they would have had to go down the kid ones by themselves, so it was understandable that they didn't want to.  But the adults had fun!  Ben rode the most times, and the girls liked watching him come out the end and make a big splash:

Jeff, Jane and Ben went down the racing waterslide a few times.  The first time, Amelia thought Grandma would win, and Megan was rooting for Grandpa, but Daddy blew them both away.  The second time, Amelia switched to Daddy and Megan switched to Grandma, and Daddy won again.  We were surprised at how fast they went!

We went to the Moosejaw for lunch, and the girls enjoyed seeing all the animal heads with Santa hats on the walls.  Amelia loved wearing her moose antlers, and they enjoyed their lunch of chicken antlers and tater stars:

We already decided that we're going to play hooky again one day next winter!

Future Olympic Diver?

Megan was showing good form as she dove off the couch into a pile of pillows.  Plan ahead to attend the 2028 Summer Olympics where Megan will make her debut as an Olympic diver!

Our Christmas Tree

I was working on folding laundry on Sunday morning, and the girls asked if they could decorate our tree.  I told them we had to wait until I could go out to buy more lights, because two of our light strands failed this year.  So this is what they did while they were waiting:

They decorated our tree with mini plastic dinosaurs.  It was so cute!  Amelia says the one in the photo above was trying to climb the tree.

Both girls enjoyed putting the real ornaments on the tree this year.  Amelia didn't need much help at all, and she spread her ornaments out quite a bit.  She liked to stand on tip-toe and reach up high to place her ornaments.  She was also very excited about both finding and hiding the pickle.  She said her favorite ornament was my little pipe-cleaner ballerina that I got as a child.

Megan needed help putting hooks on her ornaments, and she tended to hang all her ornaments on the same few branches (which are now dragging on the ground).  But she helped for a long time!

Amelia liked pretending to be Santa, but did not want her picture taken!

Snow!

Our first measurable snowfall of the year came today; we got about 2" of wet snow, perfect for making snowmen and snowballs.  Grandma and Grandpa got here right about sunset, so everyone went outside in the dark to build our first snowman of the winter.

Then we had a snowball fight, of course!  Grandpa was working on making a small snow bunny, and everyone snuck up on him with their snowballs.  I think all of us, even Megan, managed to hit him!  You won't see any photos of the cute snow bunny, though, because Amelia sat on him.  :)

Then I went inside to make hot chocolate and homemade chicken noodle soup for dinner, and Amelia stayed outside to eat the snow.  She didn't even want to come in for hot cocoa, she wanted to keep eating snow instead!

It was snowing while we were out, so those big white blobs you see in the photos are snowflakes captured by the flash.  Kind of interesting, right?