Winter in February

Ruby and, especially, Owen, are addicted to snowballs.  I regularly am convinced by them that they "need" a snowball to eat in the car and it seems that it is the first, and sometimes only, thing we do when we go outside to play.  They love books about snowmen (the ultimate snowball tower) too.  The only problem with all this is that the snow is usually too crumbly due to cold or low moisture to roll snowballs.  We got a day.  And we jumped on it to create our little friend below.  

 Owen loves hot food.  Not temperature hot, spicy hot.  Yes, this would be him sucking on a bottle of Sriracha.  He doesn't really drink it as it appears here, but he does like it on many of his foods.

 Some "snow cooking" in their new kitchen.  They loved it and request this activity often now.

 The time came...thanks to Chip.  We packaged up the binkies and "sent" them our friend, baby Samatha, Dave and Trina's adorable baby daughter who was recently over for dinner and Ruby and Owen loved.  She seemed like the perfect recipient for our plethora of used binkies. :)  The whole thing went over much better than I ever expected.  Thank goodness!  Chip called it, pushed it, and made it happen.  Dads are so important for these kinds of things.  I would have let them have their binkies until they were 15 if they wanted them!

 Owen finally was agreeable to getting his hair cut with clippers.  So, dad thought, "I have clippers at home.  How hard can this be?"  Well, let's just say that we were going to a wedding the following week and therefore we especially needed a trip to the local Great Clips after this experiment.  But, after the binkie victory, I couldn't blame him for trying. :)

 And finally, a few awesome pictures Chip got on a ski tour he did just a few minutes from the house.  Yes, that is a deer hoof sticking out of the snow.  Never know what you are going to find out there.  I am pretty sure he said he ran across seven moose (three different encounters) on this same tour too.  We love home.