Running away to the circus?

The girls had their second trip to the circus this weekend. The show was good, but it seemed way too long. We got there a little after 1 and enjoyed about 15 minutes of the "pre-show" down on the floor with the performers. As you can see below, Madeleine enjoyed the costumes and performers. Lily said she was scared of the clowns, especially after some clown underwear got thrown her way. She wasn't scared last year, so we weren't sure what to make of it.

Of course, Madeleine's goal for the afternoon was to be good enough to get a light-up souvenir. The whole last hour she kept asking when it would be over and she could get her thing. Finally, she fell asleep about 15 minutes before the show ended. When we passed two souvenir booths before choosing one, she was in tears.

All ended well though, and we were finally home a little after 4pm.

Photo Geek - new camera lens arrived

My 50mm f/1.8 arrived today. Katy wasn't kidding when she said you could really only fit one person in the frame. But it was really nice to get natural light pictures, even after dark.

Snow - Part 2

We're lucky if we get snow here once a year, much less twice in the same month. So it was a bit of a surprise when we looked out the window Saturday morning to see about 4" on the ground. I went out the side door to get the paper and found two packages covered in snow by the door. One was a package of Valentines goodies from Aunt Robin. The other was from Aunt Marcia. Very squishy, I assumed it was some kind of stuffed animal.

But no - it was the perfect gift for a snowy Saturday in February. Snow pants! She'd seen the blog post about the girls not liking sledding because they got snow on their tummies and came to the rescue. They're not exactly easy to find around here, and you hate to spend a lot of money on them if they grow out of them before they ever get a chance to use them. But she found some nice ones, and they're big enough we should have them for at least a couple more years.

We didn't go right out and play since we had ballet class in the morning, but just after lunch the sun started peeking out from the clouds. I figured we'd better get out there before it all melted.

Unlike the last snow, this was perfect packing snow. So we set out to make a snow woman. Back at Halloween, we'd decorated a pumpkin and put a blonde wig on it to look like the girls' teacher Ms. Rebecca. So for our snow woman, we decided to make a Snow-becca.

The eyes are blue M&M's (thank you Aunt Robin). Lily is responsible for the anatomically-correct features of the snow woman, although I did have to move the right one around from the side. Madeleine was in charge of stick arms. We only had about half an hour to build her before the snow on the ground was pretty much melted. We took everything we could get off the car and the decks.

Snowed in

We had our first snowfall of 2010 this past weekend. The girls of course loved every minute of it.

It started Friday night at bed time. They gathered on Madeleine's bed to look out the window and watch the flakes come down. They woke up a full hour early Saturday morning because they were so excited about the snow.

We waited until almost 11 to go out because it continued to sleet all morning. We tried sledding in the street first, and it worked pretty good. A nice gradual incline. But not super-exciting. So we tried our neighbor Joy's yard. We made quite a track, and the girls would slam into the fence if someone wasn't there to catch them. Eric thought he'd pile up snow to slow them down, but that just made them airborne.

So then we tried the other neighbor's yard. That was much better, but the girls were getting cold. They had rain boots on, and the snow had come in over the top. We left our sleds with the neighbors and went in.

About 90 minutes later the doorbell rang. It was the neighbor kids' mom. One of the sleds had shattered. So, down to one sled.

We went out again in the afternoon in Joy's yard. The snow was still too powdery for a snowman.

Sunday was a different story. Even though it didn't get above freezing, the sun warmed it up enough to be packable. We were able to make the snowman below, although Madeleine refused to be photographed with it because she wasn't happy about the raisin smile.

We tried sledding again in Joy's yard. Then we heard the neighbors on the other side and went over there. We ended up being outside for close to two hours on Sunday.

Here you'll see Madeleine's bottom layer - a 3T onesie I'd bought when they were infants. They'd gotten snow on their bellies Saturday, and this was our best option to prevent it.