Snow

 We had a snowy winter this year and tried our best to embrace it. Playing out in the snow requires a huge expenditure of effort. Simply putting on everyone's snow clothes is quite a feat, not to mention dealing with them once they're dripping wet and trailed all over the house. But if you can forget about the before and after, the during of snow play has a certain magic about it that shouldn't be missed.

Our biggest snowman of the year, Waldo. Man were those snowballs heavy!

A snow fort.

Nate and I went snowshoeing with our friend Mike. The snow was unbelievably deep and really, for me, it was more of an exercise in extracting myself from huge snow drifts once I fell over in them. But the scenery and company couldn't be beat. It started out in a wooded area, then suddenly got pretty exposed and icy and we were getting pounded by snow. At about that point, Mike got swept at least 35 feet down the mountain in a mini-avalanche. It was terrifying. So we turned around and went back to the woods and followed all the trails we found. They weren't quite as long as we'd hoped, but no one died on them. Hot chocolate at the Maverick was a perfect end to our little excursion.

Shortly before the avalanche. Visibility was getting pretty low.

This was a graceful fall, comparatively speaking.

My all time favorite snow-plays of the year were the sledding ones. We hit the train station slopes a couple times over Christmas break. After a couple initial runs, most of the children got pretty daring.