Yes, I know that many of you have had to deal with the “snowpocalypse” this winter.  It’s been bad here too!  It rained for one whole week straight in January and we even had a couple of frost warnings this winter! :-P

Yes, we’re wimps.  Here in our part of California if one drop of water falls from the heavens we get “stormwatch” updates every 30 minutes on the radio and television for the rest of the day.  However while one part of our state may be sunny and warm another may be experiencing snowstorms!  This year, after a week of storms, we headed up, up, up, into the mountains.  Our weather deprived children wanted to experience snow.  Why, I have no idea.  My goal in life is to never live anywhere that gets snow.  So far I’ve been successful.

Anyway, up, up, up we went.  Hours upon hours of driving, and, oh yeah, we didn’t tell the kids where we were headed! ;-)   We stopped for lunch in a town where, if you looked carefully, you could see little blobs of white in tree shadows.  Then on and on we drove some more, finally coming to the first snow park we’d seen listed online.  We were pretty sure we wouldn’t stop there, due to some bad reviews, but figured that it was worth a shot…

We exited the freeway and turned onto the 2 lane road.  Well… what was usually a 2 lane road.  Instead it was a 1 lane road with cars parked on either side of it.  As we crept up the snowy hill we noticed what the reviewers had mentioned.  Most of the park was now private property.  So we decided to leave.  That was easier said than done.  We were on the side of a hill, with no chains, on a road that had not been cleared properly, and our wheels started spinning…  And spinning, and spinning, and spinning.  There was no way to get further up the hill to turn around, and there were cars parked on either side of us, and by now other cars had also stopped to check out the snow park, so there was a line of 4 cars behind us!  But we had no choice, so Rob threw the big ol’ 12 passenger van into reverse and started creeping down the hill.  One by one the cars behind us realized that if they ever wanted to get anywhere they’d have to back up too.  So one by one everyone backed back down the hill until we could leave.  So we got back on the highway and headed further up the mountain.

Good mother that I am, I made sure that every potty trained child had used the restroom before we left home.  Then checked again when we’d stopped for lunch.  But now we were in the mountains, moving further and further away from civilization, and I had to go!  We followed signs to a gas station and I hopped out, along with half of the kids.  Off on the other side of the parking lot was a man with a sign saying “Tubing here!”, so my husband went off to see how much they’d charge us to go play in the snow there.

I stopped inside the gas station to buy gloves for the kids and a sled to haul the 2 littles around in.  (I hate using the restroom at a place of business without buying something, especially if it’s a remarkably clean restroom!)  Then we slipped and slid our way across the icy parking lot back to the van.  I asked Rob how much the guy wanted, then we both laughed hysterically at his “$10 to park and $8 per person not including tube rental.” as we pulled back onto the freeway.  More driving, driving, driving.  Our children, who had begged to go play in the snow for months, were now losing hope.  My husband knew where he was headed now though, so we kept driving with the promise that at the next stop they could go play!

We finally pulled off of the freeway, and after a quick stop to buy a parking permit, we were finally there!  The 4 oldest had on their layers and coats before I could even pull my boots on, and were headed up the snowy hill to check out the snow park!  Rob, awesome dad that he is, introduced them to snow by pelting them with snowballs as soon as they stepped out of the car!  I stayed behind with Spitfire and Mr. Personality to get them bundled up.  20 minutes later, after being absolutely certain that they were wearing enough layers to keep them from bending their arms and legs, I wrapped Mr. Personality in a couple of blankets and laid him in the sled.  He thought it was GREAT!  He laid there and laughed at the pine trees and the sounds of the kids playing.  Then I sat Spitfire in the sled.  She shrieked as if I’d just set her on fire and would. not. stop.  Of course if she was crying something must be wrong, so Mr. Personality started up too!  So Rob grabbed her and I grabbed him, and we headed up the hill hauling an empty sled.

At the top of the hill the boys were throwing snowballs, Little Miss Feisty was running aimlessly and laughing, and Pixie Girl was rolling, sliding, and wallowing in the snow.  She was determined to have as much contact with the snow as possible.

Rob tried to set Spitfire down at the top of the hill.  Dressed in her 87 layers of clothing, and her knee-high waterproof boots, she refused to stand in the snow.  Nope.  Not happenin’!

The boys grabbed the sled and headed down the slope first.  They laughed the whole way down, and laughed even harder when their sled tipped over and they were dumped over the side!  Little Miss Feisty and Pixie Girl thought that looked great!  So they hopped on the sled next, with their daddy in the back to keep things under control, and down the hill they went, screaming and laughing the whole way!  I was next, and deciding that there was no way she could possibly cry any harder, I popped Spitfire onto the sled in front of me and away we went!  She was not amused!

Rob met me at the bottom of the hill to hand Mr. Personality to me.  The older 2 girls wanted to go down the hill again.  They got away from us though.  Before he could even start back up the hill to go with them, the 2 girls were sledding down the hill on their own!  The snow was well packed on this hill, which made for fast sledding.  Combine that with the fact that both of my girls combined weigh maybe 75 pounds and their hands and feet were completely inside the sled.  This means that there was no drag…  My two little girlies, all by themselves, came rocketing down that hill like lightening!  They didn’t ever slow down, they just came to a screeching halt as the front of their sled plowed into a bump in the snow flinging Pixie Girl headlong into a snowbank!  She was less than impressed with snow at that point.  Brushing the snow off of her scraped up face, and out of her hair and mouth, she tried her best to recover, and soon she was headed with the boys to a longer, but less steep, sled track.

Up that hill we went, first the boys, then the girls, then Rob with Mr. Personality, then me carrying Spitfire.  I got halfway up that hill before the boys sat on the sled and from all appearances seemed to be ready to push off and come hurtling down the hill at me!  No problem, I thought, I’ll just step to the side a little and move out of their…

That’s about as far as I got in the thought process before my foot and leg sank into the snow.  With both arms holding Spitfire I had no choice but to just let myself fall and hope that my leg wouldn’t snap.  I’m pretty sure that I almost died that way once before when I was little.  I’d gone behind a rock, for reasons that any child would go behind a rock while on a trip to the snow with no restrooms nearby, and taken a step off of a tree branch that I had no idea had been hidden under all of that snow!  Down I’d sunk between branches, screaming, until a family friend who was nearby pulled me out.  I was a lot smaller then.  I knew that sinking into the snow now my family would just leave me to die.  So I sunk, and I fell, and Spitfire screamed even louder, and I prayed that my leg wouldn’t snap as my foot twisted sideways between branches of a pine tree, and then I landed.  I laid there half upside-down on the side of the sled track and laughed so hard!  My husband and children (boys still on the sled) stood at the top of the hill staring down at me and that made me laugh even harder!  Spitfire laid on my chest with a death grip on my arms and would NOT let go, so there was no way for me to move, and I began laughing so hard that I could barely breathe!

I finally pried her off of me and extricated myself, then swung her back up onto one hip and trudged the rest of the way up the hill.  Now Pixie Girl was crying too.  Somehow during all of that she’d managed to get her boots full of snow.  Between that, the forced tasting of snow, and seeing the frozen landscape try to eat her mother alive, she was done.  She’d had enough.  No amount of reminders of how much fun she’d been having would console her.  I turned to ask Little Miss Feisty if she was ready for her turn to sled and found her crying too.  The adrenaline had worn off, reality had finally hit, and she realized that her -5% body-fat was causing her to slowly freeze to death through her 75 layers of completely dry clothing.  At some point during all of this I’d set Spitfire in the snow and Mr. Personality had been handed back to me.  Rob and the boys trekked off to find taller, faster, steeper hills, and I stood with the cryers.  Mr. Personality was now crying too.  If everyone else was then that was a good enough reason for him to start!

So there we stood at the top of hill #2, 4 crying and me trying to explain to people that they really were fine.  I decided to take them all back to the car, where the screams would be contained.  Down the hill we step-slid-slogged, me in front with Mr. Personality, dragging Spitfire along by one arm (she had been convinced long before that the snow had rendered her incapable of moving), with Pixie Girl and Little Miss Feisty close behind.  Rob met us at the bottom and helped us up and over the snowbank to our car as I watched my boys climbing up, up, up, up, up, the side of a mountain that their mother would never let them climb up, or slide down, on their own!  After all, they might step off a branch and be lost forever!  Two or three times I pointed to my 2 little boys, who were rapidly becoming specks on the side of a mountain and asked if Rob knew they were that far up there.  “They’re okay” was the only answer I ever got back.  I finally stopped asking when he began heading in their direction.  At least if they sunk he’d know where they dropped and we could start searching the trees there during the spring thaw!

I got in the car and began peeling layers of wet clothing off of the little ones and dressing them in dry clothes.  They continued to scream the entire time.  I got them all into their carseats and the screaming continued.  Finally I remembered the bag of M&M’s Rob bought me at a gas station on the way up the mountain, so I started divvying those up.  It didn’t silence them, but it did bring the wailing down to a dull roar.

We sat in the car on the side of the road and watched the cars go by and after a while our manly men came over the hill.  Dexter was now crying because as soon as the fun was over he realized just how cold and wet he was!  After they’d changed (huge vans with dark windows are wonderful!), we headed back down, down, down, the mountain.  All but Prince Charming as determined as their mama to never ever live anywhere that there’s snow!

Mission accomplished!

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