Snowmaggedon

Exactly a month ago, Christmas was almost upon us.  We hadn't had very much snow to speak of yet, and we hadn't busted out our snow shovels in almost an entire year.  We went to bed with a grassy, wet lawn and woke up to a solid 8-10 inches of the fluffy white stuff on everything.

Of course, no schools had been cancelled, but I wasn't going anywhere until the snow plows came by, having learned my lesson more than once.  I informed the office that I was working from home. Preston has a shorter memory than me, and said he was going to try and go to work.  I told him not to, but he didn't listen.  Lucky(?) for him, he couldn't even get out of the driveway in our little green car that didn't have its snow tires on yet.  It had rained before it snowed, so the street was slippery and slushy under those inches of snow.

Dax, who still hadn't grasped the need for silly things like gloves or coats, ran outside to "help" dig dad out.  

We got the car back into the driveway and began to shovel.  And shovel.  And shovel.  We shoveled for an hour at least.  During our shoveling adventure, the kids helped enthusiastically for about 23 seconds, and then ran around and played the rest of the time.  The school bus for the junior high kids showed up an hour or two late, and proceeded to get stuck in the road right in front of our house.  Preston left off shoveling and tried to help dig out the school bus with some help from our neighbor (Soooo thankful that it is not my job to drive any motorized vehicles on days like this).

After shoveling the driveway and the sidewalk (dang corner lot), there was probably two or three inches on the part of the driveway I shoveled first, so I just started over again.  It was coming down steady and hard.  My carpool buddy's husband decided to take his junior high kid to school in his trusty truck rather than risk the clearly questionable school bus, and even offered the only kid that was on the bus a ride as well.  He actually made it there and back.  He decided he would take his kids down the elementary school, and offered to take ours.  I went into the house and informed the kids (who had given up on playing in the snow) to get their stuff together.  They groaned and whined but got in the trusty truck.  They waited a while since the neighbor was now digging out a different neighbor who had gotten stuck on the corner.  

Eventually, they all made it down there, and soon after I declared the driveway good enough and headed back inside to try and get some work done.   As I worked, the snow snow snow came down down down.  It was 11:00 a.m. and still no sign of a snow plow.  

At some point in the day I stuck a ruler on the table on the deck.  By the afternoon, the ruler was lower than the snow.  I'd say that is 13 or 14 inches.  

As the time for school to get out drew near, I asked Preston to put the chains on the SUV and see if he could make it down to get them.   Good husband that he is, he obeyed and chained up the car.  Lucky for him the snow plow finally showed up about this time, so Preston was able to make his way down the hill and back up with our kids and the car pool kids safe and sound.

There was more shoveling throughout the day, and by the time the Christmas lights turned on, our lawn that had been grassy 24 hours earlier now looked like this:

We ventured out one last time that night for Arden's gymnastics show (more on that later) and made it down okay and got cocky and took off the chains.  However, we had a hard time getting back up to our house and had to take the very long way around to find a sufficiently plowed route. . Ah, the joys of living on a hill in the winter.