January Snow Day

  

The girls and I had a proper snow day yesterday. We built an ice sculpture, Penelope has been asking daily if it was cold enough and finally it was. Penelope learned about this from an artist  who had an outside exhibit of his ice sculptures at a gallery downtown a couple weeks ago. She and Steve happened upon him working on his sculptures outside the gallery on their way home from the library. They stopped and watched for a while, and the artist explained how he did it to Pen. Then later in the evening, after dinner, we walked down in the dark to look at his work on display and it was pretty amazing. Penelope must have really been paying attention when the artist told her how he did it, because she told me exactly how to do it, like she'd done it all before. It was beautiful in the sunshine during the day, and then at night we put a candle in it and it was a whole new work of art!

After ice sculptures we headed to our local hill for some sledding. It was a ton of fun for Pen and for me, but not so much for Violet. It was windy, the hill faces the bay and there was a lot of snow blowing around the ground. For most people it means snow blowing on their boots and snowpants, for Violet it means snow in the face. But she eventually found a long stick she became quite attached to and went around drawing lines in the snow with it and smacking snow covered bushes so the snow came falling off. She reminded me of Peter in The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats.

After all that cold fresh air we came home and had hot soup for lunch followed by a huge pile of snow related books before naps and quiet time. It was a perfect snow day.