It snowed off and on in Indiana for several weeks from October to mid December.  I enjoyed the snow, but not the ice that also accompanied it.   

    

In early to mid December, we had a beautiful few days of snow with accumulation. Then a week of rain and warmer temperatures, followed by a week of cold temperatures.  By Christmas all the snow (and ice) was gone.  

It is amazing how fast it changes! Everything is temporary.  How could our frozen landscape disappear?  I thought for sure we would have a white Christmas and the landscape would look like this until the spring thaw!  Who knew the spring thaw would happen a week before Christmas?  

While the beautiful snow lasted, the kids enjoyed sledding, exploring a frozen and fluffy landscape and the properties of snow, and building with the snow. 

They love to be outside, and they had a lot of fun playing in the snow.

For several days in a row they made giant size snow balls.  

And hauled snow on sleds over to where they were making a snow fort.  My eight year old son and six year old daughter joined as a team and made a snow fort out of hundreds of small snow balls stacked ontop of each other.  Then they used their gloves to shape the walls as they built them.  They ended up with four walls waist high when they were done.  I could not believe how well coordinated they were to build their fort.  Well done kiddos!

And another snow fort used a shovel, sled, and a plastic box to create snow bricks. 

One son took over where another one left off because he got too cold and went inside to warm up.    He scooped up snow with a snow shovel.  Then he packed and pressed the snow into the plastic box.  When he did this very far from the fort, he then used the sled to haul his box of snow back to the fort.  

Then dumped the pressed snow bricks onto the wall he was building.  He really enjoyed building with the snow.

If we get a chance to build snow bricks again, I think we will take squirt bottles with water and food coloring and spray the bricks different colors next time.  This was a fun building project.  I have challenged the bigger boys to try to engineer arches into their walls next time too.  We could also guestimate square footage and lineal footage too.

Both forts were fun to build and the kids put in lots of hard work to create them.   Both teams built a stack of snow balls for ammunition too.  They had a blast with their snow ball fights and hiding behind their fort walls.   However, the fun was short lived because after two days of building and playing, the freezing rain came and turned everything into a solid sheet of ice.  Their snow ball stashes became solid as rocks.  They made the mistake of throwing one of these at a sibling the next day, and it was so painful that no one had fun and they quickly came back inside.  The freezing rain gave way to just more rain and the temperatures warmed up and everything the kids had built soon disappeared.

About the same time the snow disappeared, the kids came down sick with a respiratory virus and it has been a rough three weeks so far, and it looks like there is a week yet to go.  It started with one child, and he seemed to be the only one with it for almost a week, then boom, one by one everyone else (except our daughter) came down with it.  Playing outside in the cold building their forts, and perhaps lowering their body temperature some and breathing all that cold air, may have made them more susceptible to the virus taking hold, but I don’t know.  We also have not had the protection of raw milk in our diet for several months, so I believe this has also lowered our immunity some.  Raw milk provides oligosaccharides that bind virus and bacteria and also natural vit D, vit C, CLA, vit K, and a whole bunch of other protective qualities.  We truly miss our raw milk and are looking forward to either getting a dairy cow, or finding a source for raw milk soon.  And since we are in a different state with different folks and different illnesses, it just seems our bodies need time to adjust too.  We also heard today that our state has some of the worst cases of the flu in the nation so far this winter.  

So for the past two weeks for all the kids, and three weeks for one of the boys, we have stayed bundled up inside, going through fevers, coughing, and very bored.   We have watched Christmas movies, played games, built with Legos, and read books an
d they are bored.  They miss playing outside.  The kids are begging for more snow and for their colds to go away so they can get back to playing.  Thankfully they had Christmas to look forward too and that kept us going with hope.  It seems to take a full two weeks of yucky symptoms to get on top of this illness.  Most of the children are over the worst part of the virus now except the oldest. The oldest son seems to have the worst case of it.  It is very hard for him to cough it out and he had the highest and longest days of fever than the rest.   As a parent, it hurts to watch your children suffer and go through illness.  I want to take the pain away for him.  He started the symptoms exactly seven days ago, and I hope he shows improvement and gets better in the next few days.

Everyday the children anticipate more snow.  I have even heard a couple of them pray for snow.  I say “let it snow”, but please “don’t let it ice”!  

 “Let It Snow”.