Whoa! Snow!

 Ok! Enough with the snow already! We've been getting decent blocks of snow every few days. The city has refused to close the schools, regardless of how unsafe the road conditions have become. Now, I wouldn't mind having the schools open with the snowfall, except we weren't getting plows or salt at those times. So...snow started at 9am, pretty manageable to get Penny to school, but then now plow until 9pm and six inches of snow sticking to the roads in the interim. How was I to get Penny from school? By making a dog sled out of an underbed storage container and hooking myself up in front of it so that Paul could ride in comfort to go pick up his sister. Thankfully, someone was nice enough to give us all a ride home because I was pretty darned exhausted after lugging Paul for about 0.75 miles.

Penny and I did take the wintry opportunity to go learn about maple syrup. Penny was way more interested in tromping about in the deep snow than in poking a bunch of trees with pointy tubes. She did provide the very important stick for cleaning out the tube to allow the sap to flow out. She was absolutely soaked through when we got back in the car and pretty thoroughly pleased with her snow hijynx.

I'm glad she at least got that opportunity this winter. It has been a sad one for me because just about every storm we've gotten has been perfect packing snow. But there's just no way I'm making a snow man with a baby pasted to my chest. All the good storms have been on weekdays so far, so Dan can't take the kids out either. It's been eating at me. Poor Dan has been shoveling us out day after day, sometimes piling his work to form makeshift snowmen. I'm looking forward to a few more days of temperatures in the 40s and 50s so we can finally clear away these teaser piles of snow that we can't enjoy. Of course, these piles are becoming increasingly ugly as the salt and debris are left behind in the melt. There were some parked cars on a street littered with potholes yesterday completely encased on the street side with a solid inch of gray ice. I felt sorry for the cars and owners - how will they ever get clean?!