What To Do With 21 Inches of Snow

Greetings to everyone.

The weather prognosticators said it would hit Thursday night. As Thursday approached, the warnings changed to Friday, then to Saturday, then to late Sunday morning.

Saturday had nothing more than a light dusting of snow, though an hour north 12 inches had fallen by the afternoon.

Sunday morning came, but any snow on its way to South Denver did not seem concerned by any of the weather alerts. We did not go to church; in fact, the church sent out notification that it was not going to open due to the weather, weather as yet unseen.

About ten o'clock the snow started falling, by ten-thirty we had at least an inch on the ground. Finally, some snow.

There was some wind with the snow, and we had large drifts measuring in excess of four feet when the day had ended and the snow tapered to a fine powder falling from the skies.

Xavier spent several hours outside in the snow, on and off. The snow was just a little too dry to pack. Neither he nor I shoveled snow; there did not seem to be a point until 7:00 PM ish, but then it was too dark to do anything.

Jeffco Schools announced a remote learning day for Monday. While Xavier fixed breakfast, I broke out the snow thrower. After breakfast, Xavier Zoomed in to class and I came in three and a half hours later, after 4 driveways and all the connecting sidewalks. The average depth of non-drifted snow was about twenty-one inches.

Xavier and Rebecca went sledding in the afternoon after school and lunch (his school day was shortened and Xavier finished his work before lunch).

Tuesday, Jeffco also declared a remote learning day. Again, Xavier finished his work early. We had lunch, then went outside to build an igloo.

I had told him of how my dad helped us build an igloo back when I was about Xavier's age. That storm dropped forty-six inches of snow. The story of the igloo inspired Xavier, so out we went.

"My mission is not to go inside until I complete the igloo."

We got one and a half rows of "blocks" (more cylinders/cores as we were using a five gallon bucket to make bricks). Xavier, sitting in the snow, decided the igloo was too much work. He wanted just to make a fort and what we had looked good enough.

I asked him what happened to his mission. He made his proclamation with such assured conviction. He then decided he wanted to go inside and rest for an hour.

I told him if he did that, he would never finish the igloo. So, we added another one and a half rows to the wall. We even had a tunnel to crawl through to get inside.

At this point, Xavier had enough building. It was snowball fight time. As I had several unplaced blocks staged, we decided to put them up before the fight.

As Xavier looked over the structure, and especially at the entrance, he decided it looked like an ancient ruin (interestingly, ruins as in from the ruins left behind by the Ancients in Starget SG-1).

With that observation, we stacked the last of the blocks to make it look more like ruins. We even made a fallen column.

We decided Xavier won the snowball fight and we went in to warm up.

Wednesday, Rebecca and Xavier went out after dinner and had a snowball fight and built up the rest of the wall.