Attempting Mary Poppins: Snow Day!!

Tuesday the Wichita School District closed school for our first snow day of the year. Payton was so excited to have the day off and I was so excited to not have to run around and corral all the kids for school.
Payton immediately started asking for his "movies on the computer." He's addicted to YouTube. Turns out there are lots of kids just like him that are obsessed with garage doors and hangar doors and he watches all of their movies. It's thrilling. Ella and Maddie were playing princess over their pajamas which was really too cute. I had to put some effort into Ella hair because I couldn't stand to look at her mullet anymore. If you hadn't heard, she cut her own hair the other day. It's...special.

We stayed in pajamas as long as we could.

I love Ella's dressing combinations....

She always has her tongue sticking out...don't know why. She'll need to tuck that in if she goes outside. Hey what a great idea!! Let's go outside and play in the snow for our snow day. Let's spend 35 minutes cramming 3 kids into multiple layers of clothes and send them outside to play in the snow when it's 14 degrees outside and gusty. Good plan. The dressing did not go well. It was a lot of looking in bins of hand-me-downs and bags of out-grown clothes to find all the appropriate attire.

These were Bean and Abby's old snow boots, but the girls lost the laces for me so we had to improvise...

Say CHEESE!!!....You're going to FREEZE!!!

Out the door!

Ella loved it. She understood the concept that she needed to keep moving to stay warm. She made some serious tracks out there. A pink streak of lightning.

Maddie did pretty well. She's not too graceful to begin with, and then with the burden of Payton's old snow boots and a couple pairs of socks and a hat that kept covering her eyes...well she fell down a lot.

Payton wanted to throw snow. Shocking. If his arm and obsession with throwing don't pay off with a major league pitching contract, I'll be very put out.

Ella was very determined to make the Tonka truck drive in the snow.

Maddie set off to clear off the sandbox. I love this picture! It's sweet.

The reason I knit.

So the magic lasted about 5 minutes. Maybe 7 minutes, but that's being optimistic. The crying and begging to go inside started in quickly. Maddie was fine, but the other two weren't too happy. Frozen cheeks.

I tried to convince them that they just needed to run around to get warmer, but convincing them to do so just made me feel like I'd taken the PE whistle and was making them run laps. So we gave up.

Then the magic was not only gone, but the experience turned from wholesome moment to abusive mother. Making them play in the snow...how dare I.

They hated me. They cried and screamed as I tried to tear the wet, snowy clothes from them. First I force them into the elements, then I take them to the garage and strip them of their clothes?! SRS.

So after convincing them that the only way to feel better was new clothes they settled down into passive anger.