OK, I lied...

... NOW mother nature can return things to normal!

Last night, I went sledding for the first time since.... well, I don't know how long it's been!

We went to a pretty awesome hill about 15 minutes from home. The hill is actually on the property of a school/church. The parking lot was roped off (and pretty icy), so cars were lining the road outside the school.

The hill was actually a sort of valley, so there were two hills converging into one common abyss. One hill was long and the other significantly shorter. A lot of the younger kids were hanging out on the short slope.




We had Jude and I wanted him to get a go or two, so we went to an un-worn section of the smaller hill and Ryan and I both took him down. The key is that it was unworn... so, we didn't go very fast at all. I said we'd be fine taking him down something with a little more "umph", but Ryan insisted we hold off until next year.





As I mentioned before, Jude hates being bundled up, so his patience only went so far. After his couple of runs, Ryan and I had our share of fun, trading off Jude-man as we went.




I had to practically tear Ryan away when it was time to go. He was thrilled on our way home when he found out some more friends had showed up after we left and I gave him the OK to head back for just a few more minutes.

Because I love sharing pictures...

The weekend storm...

An after-lunch rinse:

Daily story time...

snow... snow... snow...

preparing for our snow ball fight...

Bryan took care of business. We set up four walls, one for each person to stand behind, in the middle of our yard. We put a "flag" in the middle. We threw snowballs at each other from behind the walls and if you could dive out from behind your wall and touch the flag before you got hit, you got a point. Jude was only so interested in the snow, so I only enjoyed the first half, but it was oh-so-fun.

Buddy was LOVING the snow! LOVING it! I would throw snowballs on the ground around him and he was running after them like they were balls. At one point he was digging into the snow to try and "find" the snow balls.