Snow Day!

The words “Snow Day” mean different things to different people. To school children, they mean a day of sleeping in and (depending on your age) either texting your friends or playing in the snow all day instead of going to school. To working folks, they mean blowing off shoveling until the temperature hits a positive number, working at home in your PJs all day, and as many extended coffee breaks as you want. To teacher-type working folks, they mean a day to catch up on housework and lesson plans but also a dreadful anticipation of sitting in a classroom in 120-degree weather in late June. To a stay-at-home-mom, they mean an opportunity to have wonderful seasonal fun with your children instead of the usual routine of dragging them, kicking and screaming, to the grocery store (because you did that yesterday, along with the rest of the known universe, once the meteorologists started going mental about the incipient snowpocalypse).

To a stay-at-home mom – at least, to this stay-at-home mom - a snow day will theoretically involve bundling up and making snow angels, having snowball fights, sledding on a local hill, maybe even ice-skating, all followed by mugs of hot cocoa with melty marshmallows. A mom of pre-schoolers and toddlers will envision making sno-cones out of clean, fresh snow and fruit juice, and creating beautiful snow- and ice-based crafts like paper snowflakes and glitter-covered polar bears and penguins and, if she surfs Pinterest at all, painting with snow and food coloring.

In her mind, her day will be spent thusly:

In reality, however, her day will look more like this:

Fortunately, no matter how her snow day actually goes, she can always end it like this: