Snow Day

It snowed here overnight and lightly all day today. I'd guess maybe 3-4 inches total? Not enough to affect the normal day-to-day activities around here, but enough to cover the ground with a beautiful new coat of snow. There has been snow on the ground here since the beginning of November, but it had been over a month since new snow. So the dirty, icy, old snow is now covered with pretty snow :) I had been waiting for it too! Ever since I found a recipe for the kids to make ice cream with snow, I've been hoping for some new snow. Here is the recipe we used:

• 1/2 cup half and half (milk may be used in a pinch)
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 4 cups crushed Ice
• 4 tablespoons salt
• 2 quart size zipper-seal bags 1 gallon size zipper-seal freezer bag

Fill a gallon freezer bag (halfway) with ice (or snow). Add 4 tablespoons salt. Put milk, vanilla, and sugar into a quart-size bag. Seal tightly, squeezing out any extra air. Place this bag into another quart-size bag to make doubly sure no salt water gets into your ice cream (I skipped this and just risked the chance of leaking). Put the bag of milk into the larger ice bag, squeeze out the extra air from the gallon freezer bag, and seal tightly. Shake freezer bag for at least five minutes. You might want to wear gloves, because it gets really cold. Check ice cream, and if it's solid, dump into a bowl and eat!

The kids had fun with this and enjoyed the ice cream. It was pretty good! The kids also enjoyed making this creation outside with the neighbor kids:





It was recycling at it's greatest really. The giant balls used for the caterpillar were snowmen made weeks ago that had fallen apart. It's hard to tell from the pictures, but the snowballs were almost higher than Rowan's shoulders. So after some heavy-duty pushing and shoveling from Nina and some helpers, they were able to pry the balls off the ground and put them in a line. Then I went upstairs and filled 5 spray bottles with water and red, green, blue, purple, and orange food coloring. The kids had a blast decorating it! And no one was harmed in the making of this caterpillar. Oh wait...



Rowan took a tumble during the construction phase and scraped his cheek on one of the giant snow balls. He went inside for about 2 minutes and then wanted back out to help decorate. What a trooper :)