Winter Wonderland Education

I'd like to preface this post by saying that this is my first Blogspot post ever (this is Ryan posting). Erin has been asking me to post for a while now but I just haven't made the time 'til now. I've edited several of Erin's posts in the past but today I've decided to grab the tiger by the tail and go it alone!! I hope you enjoy!!

This morning we woke up to the North Carolina skies dumping snow for all they're worth! I never bothered to look at the weather channel to verify but I bet it snowed more than 4 inches or so, which was sweet! Since it was the first time Grant had ever really seen snow we had to bundle him up and give him a proper introduction to our new, and probably short-lived, winter wonderland.

The first thing he wanted to do was grab his "truck" (the yellow thing in the pic above, which is actually sort of a wheelbarrow we found down by the bike rack), put the community SpongeBob ball in it, and drive it around for a while. However, he soon found out that snow on the ground is pretty fun, while snow being blown into your eyes at 20 mph can dampen one's winter wonderland spirits. Since we didn't have goggles for him I had to show him how to make use of his gigantic hooded coat to block the snow by keeping his back to the wind. After that, it was all pretty good again.

Having completed Phase 1 of his winter wonderland education: how to keep wind-driven snow out of your eyes; we wasted no time in progressing to Phase 2: how to properly pack and throw snowballs. So I packed us each a snowball and showed him how to throw it but when he threw his and it broke on the sidewalk he stood over it and said, "Broken? Fix it? Fix it?" So I re-packed it and gave it back to him and he carried it with him for the rest of the day, as you can see in all of the post-wheelbarrow pics. Maybe Granty is destined to be a lover and that's okay by me.

How to keep snow out of your eyes, check. How to pack and throw (or hold onto) snowballs, check. Next, of course, we had to borrow somebody's sled and go down the hill next to our apartment. The snow on the hill had already been packed down by previous sledders. This was great for speed but not great for my tailbone which acted as our sled's shock absorber as we rode down the deceptively bumpy hill. As the old saying goes, it's all fun and games until somebody's tailbone catches the business end of a frozen clump of grass. Two runs of that and hot cocoa by the fire was sounding pretty good instead. Granty had a good time though and that's what it's all about.

To top things off, Grant got to see his first real, live snowman. Several had been made so as we made a loop around the complex we got to admire each of them. We even made one of our own that was ~8 inches tall and had bunny ears made of green holly leaves. Then we went inside and had hot cocoa with marshmallows. All in all, it was a great day and we were glad to finally get some of the snow that NC'ers have been telling us about for the last three and a half years!!