Got Kids Up 30 Minutes Early - Not Crazy

This morning I woke at 6:30am to a heavenly white glow wafting through the window and infusing the room. I leapt up and in a split second was eagerly staring out into the back yard. Yes! Yes! Yes! (as Kipper would say). The ground, trees and bushes were all cloaked in a thin layer of powdered sugar. To understand why this excited me so much, you'd have to know that
1. I grew up in Switzerland, where every winter it would snow at some point and we'd get to go out and play in it....and that:
2. Ever since I've been married, I've either:
a) not had a yard of my own (in New Hampshire and Chicago), or
b) not had any snow in it EVER (California and Southern France)
3. Furthermore, Jason (12) and Emily (8) have never even seen snow in their home town (unless you count Jason as a baby of 6 months old in Chicago, looking out of our apartment window). Of course they've skiied and sledded and played in the snow, but only on vacation elsewhere. It's different when you wake up in your own bed and look out to see the wonderland created in your familiar surroundings.

I am a mother who never woke her kids up from naps - I just let them sleep until they woke, even if it was four hours later (I think that only happened once). But this morning, I woke those two kiddos up so fast they didn't know what hit 'em. It was 30 minutes before their normal rousing...but once they heard the yard was full of snow, front and back, they rapidly understood my plan to get all ready for school and then (only then) have some extra time left to play in the snow before getting in the car.


Jason made a snowman in the driveway. I made one in the back yard. Emily threw a lot of snowballs and generally enjoyed the soft, pretty, wet whiteness.

And we were so very glad we did get out there in the darkness of early morning, because after school there wasn't much left.

My snowman was rolled together in two minutes flat, because I didn't have as much time out there as the kids (I was inside hurriedly getting Emily's lunch together and so on). So it had no facial features or frills. But it is STILL out there, standing fast after everything else melted around it.