Snow Day!

Quite unexpectedly, we got a bit of snow last week. The kids were so excited! They had been waiting all year, hoping we'd get some snow this winter. For 3 days straight, we had nothing but rain but on Thursday evening, it changed over to a wet, heavy snow. 

Our poor persimmon trees couldn't stand up under the weight of the snow.

Our dogwood did ok, though.

Snow angels

Because the snow started out as rain and then froze, it wasn't very good for making snowballs. We managed to make ourselves a snowman anyway.

We gave him a pie-tin hat with bird seed, hoping to get some visitors.

Mommy started a snowball fight

And Olivia gave it right back to her. :)

We don't own a sled, so we improvised an old-school solution: a shovel.

The kids loved being pulled around on the shovel

 And now, our artistic section:

 The Many Faces of Ezra

 Last year, Olivia did a nature activity book, but there were several activities she couldn't do due to the lack of snow. We pulled the book out and managed to get a bunch of the experiments and observations done.

catching snowflakes

unfortunately, the snow was more like ice pellets, so we didn't see any actual flakes.

Observing the temperature difference between the air (39 deg F) 

and under the snow (34 deg F)

"Eskimo" snow goggles. By looking through the slits, glare from the sun is greatly reduced.

We added salt to a small handful of snow.

a few minutes later, it was completely melted.

Olivia made 3 snowballs of different sizes and then recorded how long it took each to melt. 

We snagged a bowlful of snow to make snow cream with.
Emma wasn't too keen on helping out with it.

Ezra and Olivia, however, were more than willing to stir the ingredients.