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Friday, April 26, 2013

This Is The Winter That Never Ends

Dear Mother Nature,

As you probably know, the 2012/2013 winter in Minnesota has lasted roughly seven months. Congrats-that's what I call perseverance on your part. Just this week we got 8 inches of snow. On April 22nd! Really-that's going quite above and beyond.  As much as I want to book the first ticket out of Minnesota to a beach locale where we could live as bums in flip-flops for the rest of our lives, I'm trying to remain positive. For the kids. And also my sanity.

Staying positive has involved staying busy. And wine, lots of wine. Since you can't drink wine during the day (I hear it's frowned upon), I've tried to do a new craft with the kids each time you've graced our presence with a big snow storm in the last few weeks. Thanks to you, we've been quite busy. All of the projects involved snow and were big hits in our house.

Here's what we've done so far to stay busy:

Project 1: I had seen the whole microwave an Ivory soap bar all over the internet and was excited to try it with Tyson. Good clean fun is something any Mom can get behind, right?  Even Mother Nature, right? Per the instructions, this should only be done with plain Ivory soap. We placed ours on plastic wrap, pulled a chair over to the microwave and watched our soap turn into a giant "snowball."



Pretty cool, right? Unfortuantely, this excitement only lasted about two minutes. Your snow storm in March lasted longer.  Hoping to elongate my sanity, we decided to turn the snowball into flakes by hitting it softly with a small shovel over a giant bowl. Then, we added water to the soap flakes slowly until it was the consistency of dry dough. Tyson helped roll out the dough and used cookie cutters to make his own personal dinosaur soaps for bath time.

Project 2: This one might have been my favorite. Snow ice cream!! I could eat my misery away. We collected some CLEAN snow during a snow fall and then followed this simple recipe:



We made ours with chocolate milk and it was better than I thought it would be!

Project 3: This one was slightly depressing. Using an empty gallon of milk, we made a snow collector. I cut off the top and had Tyson help me measure out the snow guage and decorate the container. We put the container outside before the storm and waited in anticipation (and dread) for you to bless us with more snow.


Sadly, we collected more than the 5 inches of snow the gallon would hold. I'm reconsidering the whole booking a flight to a tropical destination.

All this is to say, thank you. Thank you for the additional opportunities to bond with my kids over winter arts and crafts. Extra thanks to you for all the abundance of supplies you provided. Tyson and Mila have loved the snow projects that we've done as I've tried desperately to hang on to the last bit of sanity I have left. 

Also, I wanted to let you know that I'm fresh out of snow crafts. If you continue to do your extra credit work and extend winter into May, I'm fairly certain I'll end up in some sort of padded room far, far away from my kids. I think they would miss me.

If you could throw us a bone and send us a 70 degree day in the near future that would be great. I've got some awesome spring crafts up my sleeve that I'm dying to use.

Thanks,

Mommy

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