Sledding at Lowes Island

On Saturday, we got hit with a pretty serious amount of snow - maybe our biggest snowfall of the season.  Church was canceled on Sunday, but that day turned out to be beautiful, in the high 40s.  We set out to find a decent sledding hill and landed at Lowes Island Elementary, just a short walk from my sister's place.  Brennan was working on building up a ramp to sled on.

Tyler was loving it, but would only allow Baba to help him.  (My folks make the drive on Saturday during the snow, they made great time to Baltimore and then from there, it took them 5 hours to get to our house.  The DC Metro area is a nightmare in the snow... driver do crazy things and do not know how to handle themselves in these conditions.)

Brennan had a blast and we eventually built that ramp up to get a little air when you hit it with the sled.  The warm temperatures made the sledding so enjoyable.  I allowed myself to be a kid and do some sledding as well... so much fun!

A snow man of their own

Although we haven't had feet of snow fall that other areas of the country have experienced, we have had a pretty constant amount of snow and with the lasting freezing temperatures, it's remained fairly white here.  The kids have had a ton of snow days - last week they only went for one day and it was a 2-hour delay.  It's nutty.  About a month ago, we didn't really have enough snow to make a great snow man, but the kids really wanted to try to make one.  It was a very wet snow and I didn't really want to venture out with them, but I offered to let them go make one on their own if they were up for it.  It was kind of dirty and misshapen, but it was their own creation and they were proud!

Ice Skating

Towards the end of January, we took the kids ice skating with Debby and Joe.  Brennan has been able to hold his own on the ice for a while now, but Tyler has had a really hard time.  Tyler couldn't figure out how to position himself to keep his feet from slipping and sliding.  It made it really hard on the adult helping him, since we'd have to support his entire body weight while he feet slid all over the place.

After struggling to instruct and help Tyler, a stranger gave us some advice, to have him "stomp" while skating.  Thankfully, that worked and although he never fully found his balance, he was at least supporting his body weight on his own legs, so we could just guide him.  Here is a little clip of his stomping, unfortunately, we had to continually say "keep stomping," but hopefully if we go a couple more times, he'll start to get it.

Here is a short clip of Brennan in action:

Here's just a silly shot of me and Brennan, his request.  We had a fun couple of hours of skating, but were all ready to get our feet out of those skates at the end of the session!