5 degrees

We have had a funky winter in Vermont. Last year, our street and backyard looked like this. This year, it has been rainy and icy with the occasional snowstorm. Most of the time it rains, then freezes over night, and then stays frozen because the temperature drops the next day. Then it starts to warm up and thaw and we have massively huge puddles all over the city. It was crazy to see our playground sitting in 3-4 inches of standing water last week, in the middle of January. So the winter is unusual for Vermont, but the temperatures have been semi-typical (and when I say typical, I mean compared to our one other winter in Vermont!). There is also a few weeks of freezing cold temperatures where the high never gets above 10 degrees all day.

It snowed a couple weeks ago, enough to actually go sledding. So we waited for the temperature to go up from a high of 9 degrees for a few days after the snowstorm, to a high of 28 degrees. Heatwave! Ha ha! We called up our friends with kids that have been wanting to go sledding too and met up with them at the Burlington country club for some golf course hill sleddin. When we got there, the air was cold, but the wind made it FA-REEZING!!!!! It took twice as long to thaw my hands as it took to take these pictures with my mittens off. Tan was not happy about being outside in the cold - he's the lump under the black blanket in the picture.

I went down the hill a couple times, then I took Kenz with me (she didn't even crack a smile - I guess she doesn't understand the exhilaration of flying down a hill on a piece of plastic yet!). We tried to coax Tan to go (he loved sledding in Colorado over Christmas), but he didn't want anything to do with it. Eli wrapped him up in the blanket, covering his face and everything, jumped on the tube, and went down the hill. And Tan tolerated it! When we got back to the car and started warming up, I check the outside temp on Eli's phone: "22 degrees, feels like 5." I'm sorry to our friends who came at my assurance of "oh it's going to be so much warmer than the past few days!" Their girls all seemed to have a blast though, regardless of the cold.

I have learned to just live with the cold and not hunker down in my house. One day I needed to run a bunch of errands so I bundled up to kids in hats, mittens, and big coats and we went from store to store, braving the whopping temperature of 8 degrees. It took a while getting the kids in and out of the car with all the winter gear on, but I was happy because it was an adventure! It made me laugh when I went to get gas and the little door to the gas tank was frozen over. I had to run inside the gas station a few times for boiling water to melt the ice.

And yesterday I went for a run in 20 degrees and it was so refreshing! But next time I'll remember to wear ear warmers and gloves.