Oh What Fun!

How long does it take one to dress one adult and one two year old to go play out in the snow? I'll give you a hint. The same amount of time that you will play outside.

Yep, it took us 20 minutes to get dressed up in boots, snow pants, and other snow paraphanelia, mainly because explaining gloves to a toddler is like explaining calculus. If they will not open their fingers, the gloves will not work. Will not. So then we switch to mittens, thinking a thumb was something easier to explain, and we wore mittens all last year, but when the thumb is separated from the herd of fingers, something happened in toddler land that made said toddler NOT WANT TO WEAR ANYTHING ON HIS HANDS.

So we went outside, me with gloves, him without, and I let him touch the snow. Let him figure out why we wear the damn fuzzy things on our hands. And when he touched the snow for the third time and held his hands out to me and said "my haans are coooold!", it was a sweet victory. Now we could really get to playing!

But if you've ever outfitted a toddler in new boots, new snow pants, and topped it off with a puffy jacket and a ski hat, you just don't get very far in this winter wonderland. We made it, oh, about 8 steps away from the deck. We played in a 6' x 6' patch of snow, and it was fun, and fine, and totally unnecessary to get out the sled, but used it anyway. And took pictures. Tons of pictures.

And after a whole 20 minutes of snow-packed fun, it was time for hot chocolate and sock drying, even though our socks were dry already (good boots, you know!). But it was the first snow of the year, and we got out there and played. Hard. For 20 minutes. I don't think a first snow could be more fun.