Lessons Learned From a Snow Day

Alternate Title: Photographic Essay of Texas Family Poorly-Equipped to Handle Literally INCHES of Snow


Snow is such a novelty across much of Texas. Sure, once you get up into the panhandle snow is much more likely, but across North Texas and farther south, snow is about as common as a football bat.

My heritage is Houstonian, so although I recall a dusting here and a dusting there of the white stuff, I'm 99% certain that in my life I've never seen as much snowfall as we received here in Central TX yesterday.

It was beautiful!

And since snow is so rare, I felt like it was the single chance my children might have in THEIR lifetimes to experience ALL the fun things an Northern-dwelling family might experience.

With the exception of sledding. And ice skating, skiing, snowboarding, and really there's an entire host of winter recreational activities that we are even more poorly equipped to handle than simple snowman-building.

In other words, we made snowangels, built snowmen, and had a snowball fight. The end.

There is no other word for my children's snow attire than pitiful. Plain old downright pitiful.

But here are a few of the things I learned from one snow day:

1) When I ask a child to put on a hat and white flakes are falling from the sky, be more specific on what type of hat fulfills the requirement.

In Micah's defense, he didn't have many choices of thermal headgear. But he IS wearing one of his favorite t-shirts under his unzipped coat, so shout out to our friends Justin and Jana, creators of I Choose To Love. Please click over to their site and support their adoption process!



2) Building a snowman is not NEARLY as easy as it looks or sounds, particularly to the inexperienced snowman engineer. The proof is in my screaming quadriceps.

I should probably get moving more.

Once we figured out the rolling technique to build up each snowball for Frosty's tri-bod, we still had to pull out all of the leaves and grass that kept sticking to the snow as it pulled up from the earth below.

And the facial accoutrements do NOT magically adhere to snow.


The eyes were once whole cookies, until they fell off of Frosty's face and shattered on the ground. Then they became sad cookie fragment eyes.

Due to our meager stock of vegetables, the children used an empty bubble container for Frosty's nose. Raisins made the mouth, but each raisin had to be inserted into holes indented individually by fingers protected only by Halloween novelty gloves.

I have no idea what happened to the part of the mouth that appears to be trailing down Frosty's body. Except Piper.

3) When you're 3, there is no better snow fun that marching around the yard leaving foot tracks.

No, she didn't have a single pair of shoes more appropriate for playing in accumulated frozen precipitation. Pitiful.

Yes, she did this for almost the entire time we played outside.

4) In the future, I should always consider that stuffing my flare leg yoga pants into my tall, heeled black leather boots for the sake of keeping my feet dry in the snow might serve it's purpose, but not without serious consequences.

Because I felt like an incredibly ridiculous and embarrassing spectacle when every other person in the neighborhood was also running around outside visiting with one another. The low point was when our across-the-street neighbor came over to introduce herself and her children for the first time. I was never more aware of my bizarre garb than I was at that moment.

There is no photgraphic evidence of my fashion faux pas because I made Jason swear that he would only take pictures of me from the waist up. And he complied because he knows what's good for him.

It was a fun day.

We were a little sad that we didn't have enough clean snow for snow cream. Maybe next time.

When I'll be so old that soft foods will be the only thing I can eat, snow cream will fit the bill.