snowy winter

So far this winter we have had two snows in the last two weeks. The first one was really a layer of ice with some snow on top followed by more ice. Not a very nice snow for playing in or making snow men. On Friday night it was a perfect snow. Yesterday morning my wife and daughter were the first to go outside and tried to make a snow man. Then Jake and I went out to finish off the job. We rolled what we thought were huge balls of snow by packing them by hand. Jake went into the front yard and created a heavy duty ice ball. He needed help in lifting it and moving it across the driveway to make it even larger. I then heard a cry for help only to find him exhausted leaning on the snow ball on the side of the house. I rolled it the rest of the way into the back yard and that ice ball became the base for our snowman. While he was working on his ice ball, I had made threes large balls made mostly of compacted snow. It took us a while to made them flat on top so we could stack them on each other. We packed icy snow around the gaps where the snow balls met. My daughter objected to us using four snow balls and also the size of them. We added a stick for one arm and I took a photo to send to my one armed friend as a tribute snowman to him. As soon as we came inside glowing over our handiwork, my daughter and Andrew took over on what we thought was a finished product. We spent over an hour on our snowman. Two hours later they were finished with the amazing Fuquay Varina snowman. This morning as I wrote this blog I saw a bright smiling face looking at me through the window. I had to asked about the buttons and the nose, to which Andrew told me the red nose was a lawn croquet ball and the three black buttons are actually office chair coasters he found in the garage!