Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow

One of the reasons I love living in New Mexico is that we typically experience all 4 seasons, though I’ve learned living in Albuquerque that the 4 seasons are not always winter, spring, summer, and fall. The seasons we tend to experience are better described as the following: kind of cold, windy, summer, and fall. The winters are pretty mild and the spring is just dusty, but we like it anyway.

Every once in a while we’ll get a really cold snap (down to highs in the low teens) and that really freaks everyone out. Every news story is about keeping pipes insulated, pets indoors, kids in jackets, faucets dripping…you know…usual cold weather stuff. It rarely snows, and when it does it usually maxes out at about 3 inches and melts within hours of falling. Don’t worry, that doesn’t stop the entire city from shutting down, there are still snow days all the time (unless your husband is a resident…then there’s no such thing as a snow day). Well, about two weeks ago (geezzzz…I meant to write this post right after it snowed) it started snowing, and snowing, and snowing! We got around 9 inches of snow at our house!

It was glorious. It was more than enough snow to cover the dirt and copious amounts of dog poop in our back yard. It covered the weeds in the front yard and made the whole city look like a winter wonderland. It was the most snow that Albuquerque has gotten since December of 2006! Naturally, I had to take the babies out!

It didn’t take long for me to realize how entirely unprepared we are for a real winter storm. Luckily we didn’t have any freezing pipes, our dogs were inside, blah blah. But…we don’t really have any waterproof clothing for our children, so, I improvised. And it was ridiculous. I knew we wouldn’t be out too terribly long, but I thought they might want to trudge around in the white fluff for a bit so I wanted to make sure they were warm enough. In my mind, warm enough meant dressing each of them in the following:

cotton tights
long sleeve onesie
ziplock baggie taped to each foot (what the what?!)
fleece footie pajamas
pants
jacket
vest
mittens
hat
shoes (little soft soled leather shoes, because that’s all we had)

It did not go terribly well. They pretty much hated it because they couldn’t even stand up they had on so many layers. There was some immediate face planting, a bit of crying, some dirty looks directed at mom, and then we loaded up in the stroller and pretended we were a snow plow and headed out for a walk. It was all pretty silly, but I’m glad our kiddos got to experience the Great Snowstorm of 2015, ziplock baggies and all!