Do you wanna build a snowman?

We went to bed on Wednesday night knowing that we were expecting a big snowstorm. A few flurries had started and school had already been canceled for Thursday. We woke up to the most snow I've ever seen fall in one night. About 18 inches! It was crazy!

The snow on the deck. You can see it is deeper in the middle away from the house.

The cars are buried. A plow came through on the street, but we are in a corner. That meant there was a good 20 ft. of space between our van and the plowed area. Guess what we had to do?

First we had to shovel to even get our front door open.

Then we took a break to play...(err eat) in the snow.

The snow was so deep, we couldn't even sled. we sank down into it. Neil had a hard time walking without help. It was up to my knees.

The snow was perfect for snowman building. We got this base so big that it took Chris and I both to push it into place.

It's hard to make out against all the white, but here's our snowman. We had to get creative to find pretzels for eyes later on since the ground was just too packed with snow to find any rocks.

So, then we got to work. The whole neighborhood was out in force to tackle the giant problem that was our road and parking area. And remember how there was a good 20 ft. to get to the plowed area? All of that had to get shoveled. It was exhausting! We were out there with tons of people for a couple hours breaking our backs to get the snow cleared from the cars before it all froze. 

It was pretty intimidating at first. So much to do! And it was really heavy snow.

The kids trying to walk through the area that we had to shovel. It was really deep!

Neil was a good helper. He'd go pick up chunks of snow to throw in the pile, and take bites of it along the way. It was pretty entertaining. I tried to talk him out of it (it was coming off the road), but that was a lost cause. 

Almost done. You can see we had a ton of people out helping.

The kids had fun helping out, and building snow forts in our piles.

It really was an intense workout, but it felt good too. The crisp air and hard work coupled with nice neighbors to chat with made it all go by quickly. We finally had our cars cleared and we could go back inside to rest.

That night we watched as all our hard work was covered up by another layer of snow. Thankfully, it was only a couple inches, so we didn't have to do any shoveling. They did cancel school again. So we have spent our Valentines' day playing outside.

We were invited to a fun park for some sledding. The park had a great hill and tons of kids were there to play with. We got there just fine, but the parking lot was sorta a disaster. It hadn't been plowed at all, so you can imagine deep snow with ruts all over from other cars. Yeah, I got my van stuck three or four times. Pretty bad too. I learned the technique of rocking the car. Back and forth, a lot. I had to have people push me out twice. It was pretty horrible. By the end of it, my legs were shaking. I'm just so glad that we made it out.

The sledding was fun though.

I guess Neil is a little traumatized. I couldn't get him to go down today. Maybe next time. Instead he played with snowmen and played on the playground covered in snow.

Today was perfect because it really warmed up. Almost 45 degrees. So we were stripping off layers. It was so much fun to play in the snow and not be cold. Besides the whole getting stuck part, we had a fabulous day.

We spent the rest of the day at home, and the girls went back out for hours to just play. It really was a wonderful Valentines Day!