Snow!

I love snow.  Growing up in Wyoming meant we always had a lot of snow.  In fact, in the morning when we left for school, we put on our hats, mittens, scarf, coat and snow pants…yep, snow pants were worn to school every day.  Buying new snow pants was just part of school clothes shopping.

Curby and I were REALLY lucky because we went to Grant Elementary school…the school with the hill.  At the beginning of winter my mom would buy a big roll of heavy black trash bags.  We would put one in our backpack and during recess all the kids would go sledding with their trash bags.  I remember feeling sorry for my friends that went to other schools that didn’t have hills.  How boring their recesses must have been.  I ripped many snow pants on that hill.  In fact, I think there’s some story about when Curby was little and we had just moved to Casper.  Mom didn’t know the snow pants protocol, and Curby wore a new pair of jeans to school.  As I recall, by the end of the day his new jeans were pretty trashed.

All that said, I love snow.  Snow was an integral part of my childhood.  Whether sledding, snowshoeing, cross country skiing (although I only did that a couple of times because lets face it, I’m a wimp and that is HARD), building snowmen or snow angels, etc.  I love winter and I love the snow!

So you can imagine how disappointing this winter in Northern Virginia has been on this Wyoming girl.  There have been several times where we were supposed to get snow, and in the end we got nothing but some pretty wet rain.  In fact, one day they delayed public school 2 hours because we were supposed to get several inches of snow…we got nothing.  To date, the DC area has gotten a total of 2 inches of snow.  2 INCHES!!!  That’s just sad.

Most people experience seasonal depression in the winter because it’s too dark and dreary outside.  I have been experiencing seasonal depression because there’s no snow.  So what do you do when the snow won’t come to you?  You go to the snow, of course.

Our awesome friends, the Grubbs, were given a weekend at a family friends mountain house in Wintergreen, VA.  They invited us to tag along and we were more than happy to oblige.  On the way up the mountain I was disappointed…there was nothing.  When we got to the Wintergreen resort there was still no “real” snow, only man-made snow on the slopes.  While it’s not ideal, man-made snow is better than no snow at all.

Here we are sledding on some man-made snow.  Ella even took it upon herself to make a few snowballs and throw them at us.

We had a ton of fun playing in the snow!  After awhile we decided to head back to the house and take a nap.  Shortly after we got to the house it started to snow…first there were small little flakes that didn’t look like they would do much, but soon the flakes got bigger and bigger.  Next thing we knew, there was snow!  And it was starting to accumulate!  Happy Katie!

I was so happy I decided that I was going to make a snow angel on the deck.

We spent the rest of the night sitting in front of the fireplace, watching the snow fall.  It was perfect!

Monday morning we had to come back to reality…the reality that even though there was beautiful, white, glorious snow in the mountains, here in Alexandria there was still nothing.  Our neighbor said it rained Sunday but they didn’t see one flake.  I’m still sad we haven’t had any snow at our house, and it doesn’t look like there’s any in the forecast, but at least I got to have one magnificent weekend with snow.