Snowy day

I was planning on taking the girls to the neighbor’s house this morning, while I got some errands run. But when I decided that I needed to shovel the 5 inches of snow on the ground when we were ready to go out the door at 9:30, I realized it might not happen.
It takes 15-20 minutes to get us all in our snow gear and ready to go outside to shovel. During this time it seems like no matter where I want to go, there is a small person standing innocently and obliviously in my way. Or sometimes she is trying to get me to pick her up, but either way it rather slows me down.
Once we do get outside the actual task of shoveling snow is hampered by the need to find the girls some shovels, fix their broken plastic shovels, and reshovel snow that they have shoveled onto my previously shoveled sidewalk. I don’t say much to them about the last part because it is so funny to watch them do it and they struggle so valiantly and yet so futilely. Then comes the almost constant need to put Thing 2’s gloves back on. She’s not much of a shoveler, most of her goal when outside is to consume as much snow as is possible. Her attempts at shoveling were thwarted by the fact that her gloves are pretty bulbous, and her hands end up more as stumpy extensions of her arms than real hands, barely even bending at the wrist unless she knocks her gloves off, which she does constantly and then cries that her hands are cold. Usually, though, before I can put her gloves back on she turns and sinks her hand in the snow and starts licking the snow off of it. Crying.
It’s amazing I get any shoveling done at all. But if I hurry and try not to let myself get too distracted and only stop to reapply gloves and rescue hats and girls who have toppled over and gotten snow down the openings of their clothes, sometimes I can actually finish before Thing 2 gets cold and gives up on the whole being outside things altogether.
Today Thing 2 stayed outside about 45 minutes, which might be a new record for her. Thing 1 talked me into staying outside a little longer after I brought Thing 2 in, but she let herself be talked into coming in around 11:00. Seeing as how we weren’t quite ready to just turn around and march out the door, what with Thing 1 kind of wet and cold, and taking into account I wasn’t sure I could get the car out the hill coming out of our garage into the still snow covered alley, I decided we weren’t going anywhere.