If you were to stick a paper cup connected to your ear against walls all over Pittsburgh, you would hear things like, "I'm sick of this snow," and "Shoveling sucks," and several variations containing multiple four-letter words that we'll just pretend I don't know. Heck, you probably won't even need the paper cup. Pittsburghers are whining pretty dang loud about how they don't want to shovel another snowflake, about how the roads are lousy, and how winter needs to be over already.
Not so much at our house.
If you had been listening in yesterday as we began to dig out from two feet of snow, you would have heard Mr. Husband and I fighting over shovels, but in a totally different way. I LOVE to shovel snow. Seriously. Mr. Husband loves to complain about shoveling snow, but he sure does jump out of bed early so he can declare himself the Master of the Shovel.
I wandered outside about an hour and a half after Mr. Husband and was SO TICKED that he didn't leave any snow in the driveway for me to shovel. I'm really not kidding. He had to have worked like a fiend, and I'm sure he did it just to deprive me of fluffy white joy. I had to resort to shoveling a sidewalk that won't even get used to get my fill of snow moving and such.
Of course, there's a reason I like to shovel snow. I like to make stuff with the piles.
But . . . but . . . but! AGAIN, Mr. Husband trumped me. Just as I was starting to make a decent-sized snow mountain with my sidewalk treasures, he went and used a snow mountain left by the street plow to do EXACTLY what I was trying to do. He built a snow cave.
Bah humbug.
I continued on with my quest, thinking that maybe -just maybe- I could gather enough snow into a big pile to make a tunnel connected to a room and maybe connected to another room. It is something that we used to do as kids in North Dakota, and I knew there was no way his Hoosier hiney possessed the skills to top me on that.
Sadly, I couldn't get enough snow gathered into one pile. I had to settle for a single tunnel connected to a single room. Blurgh.
At least Alexis was impressed. I had that much going for me.
While all the battling over Master of the Snow Universe was going on, Alexis was busy playing and playing and playing, right up until she figured out that snow tastes kind of like ice. The kid would consider ice one of the four food groups, if only she could find a way to inject some nutrition into it. So she happily sat in one of her snow caves (or as our neighbor supahmommy calls them--bomb shelters) chowing down on snow. Just as I was thinking that maybe it wasn't such a fantastic idea, Alexis caught my concerned look. She looked up and said, "Don't worry, Momma. I won't eat the yellow snow."
Already the four-year old is wiser than half of the human population. I'm so proud.