Snow Snow Snow!!!

Snow days!!  Hibiscus couldn't wait to see snow, and has been praying about longing to go skiing for several months now.  ("Dear God, I want to get to America to see Daddy and Gramma and go skiing.")  We didn't expect that her wish would be granted so quickly!  Yesterday morning Emerson burst into our bedroom saying, "Daddy, I peeked out my window, and I saw the bush, and after the bush it was white!"  At first Daddy thought he was exaggerating, but a confirmation glance indeed found a dusting of snow.  The excitement reverberated off the walls.  Literally.  Mark keeps finding all the pictures askew!

There wasn't very much, so I thought it was a nice compromise: Hibiscus got to see her first snow, but school wouldn't be cancelled and I could have my regularly scheduled day.  Before I got up, Mark checked the school's status, and indeed, school was still scheduled.  Like any child, Hibiscus complained about this, but not much because she was too busy running outside and tasting the snow!

Emerson was right along with me hoping for school to be in session.  Hibiscus is in first grade all the mornings in the week (Waldorf first-graders don't have afternoon school), but Emerson is still enrolled in only three mornings of kindergarten.  We are planning on doing homeschool on the other two mornings, and this was the first Thursday and thus the first day of homeschool.  Emerson was super duper excited about starting homeschool, and was all ready to sit down at a desk and do some lessons.  Except we don't have a desk for him, so I was trying to convince him that he could do homeschool at the kitchen table, and he had finally agreed that he would get a desk for first grade.

While I was getting ready in the bathroom, Hibiscus was nearby, and in the distance we heard Daddy answer the phone.  I was asking why she wouldn't want to go to school, because then she got to see her friends, which did pique my little extravert's attention: but snow still won out.  Then Daddy came in to tell us that that was the phone tree, and school had actually been cancelled.

"Yay!" cried Hibiscus, jumping up and down with great delight.  "I'm glad there's no school, 'cause it's really important that I stay home all day so I can see the snow all day long, and see what it does."
"There's snow at school, too," I pointed out.  My little girl froze in shock, and then her little face fell.
"I wanna go to SCHOO-OOOL!" she wailed.  Snow AND friends was apparently an unbeatable combination!


It's been a snowy winter by Willamette Valley standards.  We usually get a dusting of snow a few times in a winter, but they had a big snow in December (which we missed while our Ugandan cold spell involved not kicking off the blanket at night), and then we have just had more snow.  Yesterday the dusting turned into flurries and accumulated some real snow, and it stayed all night and then kept snowing all day today.  By the end of the day we had about eight inches of powder, which definitely makes it into the top two or three snows I've seen in my ten years in Oregon!

This might be the time to point out that I grew up in Alaska.  I spent Halloweens with a snowsuit under my costume, and months with skis on my feet.  Oregonians love to complain about the cold weather, snow, and icy roads, but I just plain love it.  I love seasons, and I love anything that seems like genuine winter.  Whenever people mentioned that I was missing all the cold weather being over in Uganda, I think they thought that I had the lucky side, but as far as I was concerned, it was just rubbing salt in the wound!  The pictures of the December snowstorm made me at least as crazy with longing as they did for Hibiscus!


The first day of snow was just plain chaotic.  Hibiscus was so excited she didn't know what to do with herself, which has a way of making everyone else not know what to do with themselves, either.  We had a playdate scheduled, and my friend and her young children came over, which meant that eventually we had FIVE little awkward snowsuited bodies tumbling around and crying when they fell down.  That was kind of the way the whole day went.  The kids had a wonderful amount of fun as soon as they went out in the snow, and then everything turned horrible before we parents could even blink, and everyone was back inside again.

Part of the problem is that certain children have not yet figured out that warm clothes keep them warm.  This is not limited to snow, but it is exacerbated by it.  The day before, Emerson and Hibiscus had dived out the door into "outdoor play time," past my offers of rain pants and mittens.  "It's not very cold any more, Mama!" they yelled as they streaked by.  It was indeed warmer than it had been that morning, so I let them go.  Minutes later they were back inside and complaining that they were frozen, which had nothing to do with refusing to put their layers on!

Hibiscus apparently found that certain articles of clothing inhibited her pure enjoyment of the snow, so the morning play-time was taken up by trips to the back door to announce that she was shivering.
"Where is your hat?" I would ask.
"I don't know," she'd reply.  (Turns out it was frozen to a concrete block in the back yard.)
"Where are your mittens?" I would ask.
"Over dere, on da table."
"Why is your coat unzipped?"
Surprised look down at her coat, which was waving open in the breeze.
"Go get your mittens, shake them out and put them on, put on this hat, and --- here, your coat in zipped and --- here, your hood is up.  Now you won't be cold any more.  Go and play."

I think we had three outings into the backyard, none of which lasted more than twenty minutes at the most.  I happen to believe that children need to spend a decent portion of their lives outside, and nature (and a big backyard!) was one of the things I missed the most in Uganda.  It snows for months in Alaska, so we wear boots and snowsuits.  It rains for months in Oregon, so we wear slightly different boots and rain gear.  Five-minute playtimes because you don't dress properly do not fly very well with this mama!



I personally did not find that a very impressive way to spend one of the few days of snow in the entire year, but luckily we did better today.  Mark had finally finished getting chains on the van to try and drive through up the driveway and off to work, when he heard that there was so VERY much snow that everyone who had made it to work was heading home again.  In my mind, a snow day for the whole family is a whole different kettle of fish than one that just means that mama has extra children for more hours!

The children talked about skiing yesterday, and by the end of the day there was enough that little skis could probably have something to slide on in the field.  Big puffy flakes kept coming down all day, and by afternoon there was enough for a genuine ski outing.  I think this is the first time I have ever been able to go for a proper ski out my back door!


Mark pulled everyone's skis out of the garage.  Unfortunately, that meant "everyone who already had skis," since we had only arrived from an equatorial country eight days earlier and had not yet had a chance to go ski shopping.  Or even snowsuit shopping, for that matter, although rain pants had been at the top of the priority list, so everyone had some outdoor pants, and friends have sent plenty of warm jackets.  Emerson still fits into what he wore last year, since he has been growing at the rate of a crocodile.  (Did you know that crocodiles grow extremely slowly, since they have a very slow metabolism?  That's why they sit around sunning themselves all the time, too.  These are the things you learn while living in a non-skiing kind of climate.)  Buttercup can wear the things that Emerson used a couple years ago, and of course Mark and I have our own things.  This leave Hibiscus off by her lonely self with no exciting snow gear.  Of course she was very upset about that, but she kept very busy and happy in the snow anyways.

Getting everyone dressed took the first half of the afternoon.  I figured that if children kept taking off their outer warm bits of clothing, at least we could make them wear more things on the inside, which they couldn't access to remove and leave here and there across the field.  So we found non-cotton undershirts and long johns for everyone, and chased them up and down the house while they found other interesting things to do and declared that they weren't cold and didn't need them.  Well of course you don't; the heater is set to 68 degrees, because this is INSIDE the house.

By the time we got outside, I figured that we had better go somewhere, so that going right back in the door was not a viable option.  We headed out across our fields, through the neighbor's field, and onto the roads going to the nearby school, which has a playground, which I thought would make a good destination.  There was so much snow and so little traffic that the roads were like smooth-but-lightly-fluffy groomed ski trails.  I can't ever remember seeing the roads covered with snow in the afternoon!



I was so proud of my two little skiers!  We have made a point of taking Emerson skiing several times a winter since he was a toddler, believing that cross-country skiing is one of those skills best learned when you are too young to realize you are learning anything.  Every year he has been assimilating the feelings a little bit more, and even after the whole year passing, he soon found his cross-country legs again.  He got frustrated trying to get through the fields, with the puffy snow and the little slopes and tussocks of grass, but went much more quickly and happily on the road.  The way up was a gradual slope, and we went back down together.  I held his hand and kept him moving, and he kept his balance right along with me, even when the downhill got more distinct.  When we got back to the flatter part, he skied on his own again.  He had had so much fun going quickly that he tried to keep doing it, and managed to get some slide-and-glide into his steps.  If you have ever been an experienced skier along with little children, you know that they tend to just plod along on those potentially magical instruments, so a little bit of slide-and-glide was a wonderful development as far as I was concerned!


Buttercup was on skis for the first time, and in snow for the first time, and in a snow suit for the second time, and had only been in America for nine days altogether.  And she took it all in stride, and decided to learn to ski.  Buttercup has this amazing intent concentration that is just wonderful to watch.  (Especially after watching her older sister bounce from one thing to another for two days without cease!)  It took a very long time to get the first fifty yards or so, also involving problems with mittens and bindings, but then she started to figure out what was going on.  I kept reminding her to keep her toes going straight, or looking right at Daddy, or in the tracks, and she would intently try to find her ski-tips and put them somewhere.  Other than that, I tried to just let her figure out how her body worked in this new way.  For a while she was trying to pick up her feet and walk, but then she figured out how to push her feet along instead.  All plod and no glide, of course, but she was skiing!  She didn't want me to hold her hand or help her, but she wanted me to stay close, so I oozed along behind her through the fields.

She looked so tiny and so determined!  She seems so much smaller in the wide open, white expanse, than she had in Uganda.  Even in her puffy clothes.  That coat is only an 18-month size; she's just such a little bitty bit of a girl!  But so full of self-determination.  Emerson had certainly never skied for so long or so well when he was that age, a few toddlers would make it through the first rash of falls and snow down the coat, and decide to keep going.

At first, every time she would fall or something would happen, she would just wail and wail.  I would pick her up and brush her off and try to fix whatever might be bothering her, and try to convince her to use some words to tell me exactly what the problem was.  About the third time through, she told me "finger! finger cold!" and I immediately addressed the problem with her mitten.  And remarkably enough, she took the lesson completely to heart and switched to using words instead of crying.  As she got more tired, she would start to forget, but with a reminder she tried really hard to find the words, and barely needed to cry any more.  I was impressed, and I could see the amount of self-control it took to try and contain her sobs long enough to describe a problem in this new world she doesn't even understand yet.


As for Hibiscus, she didn't have any skis, but she seemed to have as many problems as either of the children who did!  She kept falling down and crying that she couldn't get up.  Now when you have skis stuck to your feet, they do tend to slip out from under you, and then they really get in the way when you try and get up again.  (Ski poles aren't for beginners, and they're not necessary if you know how to ski, so we don't use them.)  However, exactly how Hibiscus managed to keep falling off her feet and not being able to find them again, I am not sure.  But Mark and I stayed plenty busy skiing back and forth and pulling children up off the ground!  Hibiscus also alternated between wailing that she was cold, she was freezing, ah ah ah ah ah cold cold COLD, and then diving onto the ground and doing something like crawling through the snow while throwing large bundles of it up into the air.  So I don't think she was really too cold!  I think it was more that whenever she felt a dot of coldness, say if a mitten started to come off or a snowflake landed on her cheek, it was so surprising it was unbearable.  Actually, given her level of hysteria for those events, I think we kept her really pretty warm!


We didn't make it to the school yet before we decided that we needed to turn around.  We switched some mittens (I only have two pairs of good mittens, which is not sufficient), shook the snow off everyone, and put Buttercup in the wrap.  She didn't want to stop skiing, and she wanted to go "on da swing," but she was the only one who had the patience for skiing another few hundred yards!  In fact, she kept skiing on after we all had stopped, but then started to cry when I wasn't next to her, and turned around.  I had gotten myself a wonderful coming-home present of a coat that unzips and has a pouch for a little head to come out of, so I can wrap Buttercup and keep her under my coat.  That got her warm and toasty right away.  Hibiscus was another story, and she cried most of the way home... and then dived into the snow, and put Buttercup's skis on her hands, and crawled around in circles in the yard until we all got inside.


By the time we got in, the snow was suddenly turning kind of wet, and while we ate dinner it rained.  The moonlight is still glistening white, but I think that might have been the end of our Ugandan girls' first snow adventure!