Last Day of Vacation

Today we celebrated the last day of the kids' vacation from school. We headed outside right after breakfast to check out all the new snow--the weekend storm dropped about 13 inches on us, and between the plow guy and the wind drifts we had some pretty big banks to play on.

Mom shoveled off the ice rink, which had about two feet of accumulation........and Mama did the deck, which had even more. Check out those icicles too!But you can't play outside forever (at least our kids can't) so we did some inside playing too. We painted yet another masterpiece in the basement....

....which started out with brushes but quickly turned into a fingerpainting party....

....and was inevitably followed by a bath.After bathtime the kids got the great idea of riding their bikes around inside the basement.They rode around a bunch of times, even though there were lots of tight corners........which sometimes got too tight....The kids loved getting on their bikes again, even if it was just in the basement. Emily is really ready for a "big girl" bike--we're probably going to try to find one at a bike swap this spring.In the afternoon we finished off the day by having another sledding party!Nana and Uncle Seth came over, along with the cousins........Luke and Alison brought their parents (we all admired Henning's snow pants)........and Cole came over with his dad and sister.Despite the large volume of snow, it wasn't really that great for sledding. The temperature had warmed up and we got some rain, which made the snow heavy as well as deep.

The good thing about snow is that there are lots of other things to do in it, including flips (Sebastian is hitting one in the photo below)........snowball fights........and even skiing!The sledding got a little better as more people hit the slope--and all the sledders had fun, which was the goal of the afternoon.Vacation has been fun, but we are all very glad to be getting back to the normal work/school routine starting tomorrow!