Her first snowshoes!

Wynn got her first pair of snowshoes for Christmas ... but we had no snow on the ground then! Finally, yesterday overnight we got a nice 4" coating - enough to give the shoes a try.  Shadow wanted to help:

Having clear skies ought to be good for playing outside, but when sunset is at 4:30 pm, there's little time to romp around.

 

She got the hang of walking really quickly, and Shadow was overjoyed to have someone to chase.

 

Let's have a video of the two of them playing!

Winter Carnival Snow Sculptures

It was a cold, windy, sunny day here in the Twin Cities but it's expected to get even colder next week. We used the clear skies as an excuse to cross the street into the State Fairgrounds to check out the St. Paul Winter Carnival's snow-sculpting contest.

About a dozen 10-foot cubes of compacted snow were delivered onto the Kidway of Machinery Hill this week, and today was a working day for the sculptor teams to put their creations together.  This year a new feature was added; a giant snow slide that Wynn and I took a ride on (very fast and no way to brake...)

They had speakers up around the perimeter of the grounds playing Johnny Cash and Kenny Rogers tunes - it's cold enough now as I write this in the evening that I can hear the music, and we are about a mile away...

That's Wynn and Baba in the orange sled!

 

Click on this picture to expand - notice the little grey clay model on the snow chunk in front - that's the pattern the sculptor is trying to achieve with the big piece

Happy New Year 2014!

No big trip this Winter Break - the biggest journey we took this season was to Hogwarts as we introduced Wynn to Harry Potter. Finished Book 1 yesterday and showed her the first movie today.  She is still trying to get her head around the idea that we had to wait about a year and a half between the books!  ("Now, imagine that the next book we'll read sometime between third and fourth grade!")

New Year's Day was cold - we had lunch at Masu at the Mall of America, but the service was dreadfully slow.

Bored, bored, bored

The Polar Vortex descended on Minnesota today, and Governor Dayton has closed all the schools tomorrow, so Wynn and Ann are getting one more bonus day of Winter Break. They'll be picking up the house & getting ready to go back to school Tuesday...

The End of Christmas 2013

We took down the tree this cold, cold morning and set the Christmas Castle out on the deck for the squirrels.  And Wynn built a solar-powered dinosaur robot.

It was a most excellent tree; still very fragrant and thirsty and held the ornaments beautifully.

 

The plastic fork & spoon for arms was Wynn's idea ... all the better to eat you with!

Squirrels love marshmallows and Kit Kat bars, apparently.

Christmas Decorations 2013

We learned how to make six-sided snowflakes this month, and used different papers we had here at the house as well as bigger sheets from school!

 

We got our tree again from the University of Minnesota's Forestry students - it was frozen up with all the branches together like a collapsed umbrella when we picked it out from the lot, so we felt lucky that the tree was so full and bushy when it thawed out!

Ornaments that look like Wynn and Shadow!

Winter Carnival Snow Sculptures

Living next to the State Fairgrounds is great - when events are taking place we're only moments away.  The St. Paul Winter Carnival is underway now, and they've had truckloads of snow brought onto Machinery Hill at the Fairgrounds for their annual snow-sculpting contest.  It was a pleasant night, so we wandered over after dinner:

Dozens of sculptures - most of them intact but there were a couple that fell apart in today's 38-degree weather...

Of course, Wynn liked the dragon.

Great detail and craftsmanship on this one!  Wynn is taking piano lessons weekly after school...

Work is still underway - this looks like it'll be a Vulcan palace when completed. They were giving fire-truck rides around the Fairgrounds this weekend; we could hear the siren going off every so often during the snowstorm...

I think this was a Far Side cartoon...

They had a big snow maze set up, and she had a blast running around inside that.

What a charmed life she leads!