March Madness Snow

My husband thinks I have been slacking because this blog hasn't seen much action.  First, I have been pretty busy with the church blog http://discoverstmark.blogspot.com/ .  Although I haven't written all of this during Lent I have typed and edited all of it. And then there was this blog http://longmorgan.blogspot.com/ which I have also been working on.

"Plus," I said, "not much has happened."  I should have bitten my words.  Saturday, we went to church---temperature in the 50's, but we did not believe the forecast of 3-8" of snow for Palm Sunday.  We were right and wrong.  It was officially 12.5" unofficially about 10" at our house.  And, we didn't even get the "thunder snow" some areas got.  Mind you, it started snowing while in the 40's and barely got below freezing so this is a h-e-a-v-y snow great for building snowmen, forts!  The picture of my front door decorations and daffodils (before I rescued them) were from Sunday.  The rest of these photos are from Monday after about 12 hours of snow.

 My strategy of putting the van in the driveway to keep one part of the driveway clear was working until I noticed the pine tree was drooped so far over from the weight that it was resting on the van---even in the middle of the driveway.  Here is the tree below on Monday.

But, it did make a great tent that I would have loved playing under as a kid. (I often made "houses" under mature hydrangea  and spirea shrubs when we lived in the city)

Snow and Skiing

I used to love snow---we often played outside with the kids, we skied---cross country and down hill. Looking through some of our old photos, I was reminded of how much I used to love it.  I learned to ski when I lived in Germany. (Click here)

Seeing the snow the East Coast got, last week reminded me of our Pittsburgh snow of 1978--with the toddler (Rachel) in front of the door.  Then, I found this photo of Leah riding her big wheel in the snow.  

Happy Birthday Girls!

L-R: Amy M., Rachel, Jamie C., Rebecca, Carrie N.

Although Rachel and Leah's birthdays are only a day apart, they only had one shared birthday party in 1982. Typically we alternated years with friend birthday party and family special dinner. We also had one with a cake and one with a pie. But, one year they were forced to share, so they're sharing the blog, too.

The Big Girls' Table

But, back to 1982. . . .that was the year of THUNDER SNOW around Jan. 30! If you've never had thunder snow, you never want it--we had two feet of snow. Even the snow plows gave up. I think we've only had it one other time since 1982. We were all house-bound---our street was not even cleared. Click here for more information about this storm. If I recall, we didn't even get mail delivered for days. After several days, everyone was going nuts, so we had a birthday party!

L-R: Kelly N., Emily M, Leah

We hired the teenager across the street (Meg F.) to go from house to house to pick up the neighborhood guests. She slipped the kids into trashbags because the snow was so deep the snow just piled right back onto the kids. I'm sorry I don't have any photos---just getting 5 little girls into the house, out of boots, coats was more important.

Since a lot of planning didn't go into this party, it looks like we had grilled cheese sandwiches, chocolate milk and I seem to recall some kind of dessert we made with snow---a snow ice cream? Maybe some of the girls can remember more about this birthday.