Snowed in

I’ve been a terrible blogger. I’ve posted what, twice in three weeks? Yikes.

I mentioned last week how I’ve had a lot of problems with WordPress since they upgraded me to the new version. That—on top of everything else that has been going on that I need to catch up on—was a huge deterrent to blogging. Thankfully, once I actually had a few minutes to sit down and look at it, I was able to find an easy fix through the support forums.

I feel like I fall into these periods of blogger slacking a few times a year. This time, it’s not because of writer’s block, it’s because there’s been so much going on and so much to catch up on that I’m actually overwhelmed. And sometimes that’s sort of paralyzing.

I don’t know that I’ll actually ever officially catch up, but I feel some sort of obligation to post a little bit about Christmas just because I always have and for my own benefit, it’s fun to look back on those posts year after year. So you’ll see that coming, albeit weeks late!

We have had A LOT OF SNOW. It started the Sunday before Christmas. We got several inches overnight, and in the morning we were compelled to take Nora out to play in it, really for the first time in her life. I actually gave Michael one of his sorely needed Christmas gifts early—a pair of Northface winter boots!—which ended up being a CLUTCH purchase because holy cow, in the couple of weeks since he has already gotten tremendous use out of them. My sister-in-law gave us a pair of hand-me-down snowpants for Nora to wear, and my mom bought Nora a pair of winter boots and mittens for Christmas, which she also gifted early so that we could go out in the snow. We actually feared that it might be our only chance (based on last year’s mild winter)… HAHA! Boy, we had no idea.

I figured that taking Nora out in the snow could go one of two ways: Badly or wonderfully. Thankfully, it was the latter. She freaking loves the snow, you guys.

We brought a basket of her sand toys out there and she was delighted.

We were lucky enough to get a fresh coating of snow—nothing major—overnight on Christmas Eve, so we woke up to a wonderfully white Christmas. Yay!

And then the dumping started.

My dad drove up on Christmas Day, thankfully, because if he had chosen to come any other day that week he probably would’ve been screwed. The snow started in the late afternoon on December 26 and we got a huge storm—1-2 inches per hour—that lasted through the night. When we woke up the next morning, I stuck a yard stick in the snow outside on our deck, and, well… see for yourself.

That’s close to 15 inches, folks. And it just DID NOT STOP SNOWING. My poor dad—the warm-blooded Virginian that he is—he had not seen snow like this in a really, really long time. In the week he was here, we accumulated a good TWO FEET of snow. We still have most of it out there, too. Fun times.

Fortunately, we didn’t have to try to commute anywhere in this mess, because we took off of work. We did venture out a few times, though—one afternoon, Michael, my dad and I took Nora and met my brother and Hunter at a nearby sledding hot spot for the kids’ first sledding adventure.

It’s a pretty big hill, so we went down with Nora every time. I thought maybe she’d be scared, but when we’d reach the bottom, she immediately demanded, “More? More!” in her sweet little voice. Love.

It’s been a chock-full few weeks, even if some of those days were filled with a lot of little nothings. In other words, we’ve been buried.

I’m working on digging my way out. :)