Monday, January 25, 2010

Snow Day?

So big oops on my part - I let the kids play hookie from school on Thursday because the weather was miserable and then I get a call early Friday morning that school has been canceled for the entire district due to the weather. A quick peek outside the window verified what I thought the weather man had said the night before; the worst of the storm had passed. It was almost sunny outside. I was confused.

It seems to me that the powers that be should have canceled school on Thursday when we saw record rainfall and had flash flood warnings. When it was cold enough the next couple of towns over to see snowfall. When the winds were forecasted to gust up to 50 mph. My only guess is that they realized their mistake and/or had a ton of complaints from teachers and parents on Thursday and tried to rectify it by canceling school on Friday instead. But no matter, we had an unexpected 4 day weekend on our hands.

And if you are going to essentially give us a snow day, I want to see snow. So we drove over to Pioneer Town. Built in 1946 as a movie set for western films, not only it is a cool little tourist attraction but it is also just a little higher in elevation than Yucca Valley, which brought the promise of the elusive snow we were searching for. And not only did we find a good amount of snow on the ground, but we caught the last snowfall from the week's worth of storms. The kids were in heaven!

We all have our favored activities when it comes to snow. For Jadyn, it is eating snow, as anyone from last year's storm will remember:

And a rare picture, where she isn't eating snow:


For Jake, it is engaging in a snowball fight:


For me, it is getting pictures in what is clearly a novelty for us:





For Joe, it is indulging my need to have tons of pictures so I will put the camera away and just live in the moment (which I did, by the way):


But eventually the icy snow and gusty winds got the better of us, and not even a warm hug from big brother could keep us happy out in the cold:


Back at home with the rest of the weekend before us, I decided to play with some photo editing tools at Picnik and took a photo of one of the buildings up in Pioneer Town and played with it.

Before:


After:



So that is our tale of the nonexistent snow day that turned into a real snow day and another fun family adventure for The Funny Noses.

3 comments:

Heidi O said...

This is a great post. I love the photos and the fun. I need to take my kids to mt. Charleston so they can play in the snow that's if I can drag my husband along.

Joanna said...

LOL, I love that you went looking for snow on a snow day. That just makes so much sense. It also looks like fun.

As for the photo editing. Very nice. I really need to work on learning how to do that. But, everyone else does a much better job than me, so I get frustrated.

Mel said...

I've never heard of school closures for flash flooding before. Makes sense though. Fun "snow" day, and so cool that they actually got to see snow!