And it's cold, cold, cold

As all of you have probably heard, we've been slammed with snow.

For the first time in the history of the kids' school they had two snow days in a row.

And it's only the fourth time in over a half century that the school has had a snow day.

All in all it's been quite crazy.

This is the first blizzard I can remember being in in a long time.  It was crazy to see what happened.  The wind was so strong that it felt like the windows in the kids' rooms were open(they all face East).  In fact it was so strong that our front door looked like this the next morning:

Did you notice that the mail slot even has a snow drift?

We experienced a snow thunderstorm.  It's really weird to have lightning and thunder with snow outside.  Usually I think of snow and quiet or peace.  But this storm was anything but peaceful.

At about three in the morning The Little One woke up freezing cold.  She was already in two layers so I added another.

I think that the third layer finally did the trick.

Sweetie made the most of the morning by sledding down the best hill within a hundred miles of us.

He had a blast.

Sledding down the stairs did make it tough to get back up later.  We had to pull them up when they were ready to come inside.

We also started making a very impressive snow fort.  It's even bigger now that they've had a few days to work on it.  I think that we'll start another one tomorrow.

(Thanks K & D for the good snow-fort-making advice.)

Sweetie and I had some errands to run today.  We didn't want to drive so I thought walking would be fine.  It wasn't as great as I thought it would be.   

Right before this picture we had to walk through a place where no one had walked.  I didn't have any boots on so Sweetie said, "Follow my footsteps Mom!"  Luckily we found some more footsteps not too far away.

I'd say that only 20-30 percent of the sidewalks were shoveled.  Most looked just like these.

I promise there is a sidewalk and even a road under there.

Everyone has said to us the past few days, "Welcome to Chicago!"  I'm not sure this is the welcome that I wanted, but I'm always up for an adventure.  And this week adventure has certainly fit the bill.