Winter Wonderland

This weekend we decided to break our routine and go up to the Berkshires to visit Neil's parents. Neil's dad is making a miraculous recovery from his second hip replacement operation, but they are still somewhat housebound due to the snow and ice outside. His father is able to walk quite well with a cane, but it is too risky to go outside and possibly slip on the ice.

It was a real treat for us because we have basically had no real winter here. I'm not a huge fan of the cold weather, but there is something very unnatural about bypassing an entire season. I don't count one week of cold weather to equal winter.

We took a short, but pretty walk behind the Beckerman's house to see such lovely ice sculptures as the ones below.





Lindsay is a real nature lover, and for the most part gets deprived the absolutely wonderful childhood pleasures of things like eating snow and icicles. She more than made up for that this weekend. She must have consumed a gallon worth of snowflakes. We even served her snow soup.



Then we decided that since the ponds weren't quite frozen enough to skate on, we would make our own rink. Neil got his parents hoses and sprayed a patch of their yard to make a rink. After the first attempt of using frozen hoses, we got smart and hung them by the fireplace to thaw. The second attempt was much more successful.






I got a new pair of skates that weekend on a pretty impressive sale. They now make sporty INSULATED skates! What a great idea. Wonder why that took so long to figure out?? I don't have a photo of it, but some of the droplets of water from the hose froze before landing and made beautiful frozen jewels. We felt like we were gathering diamonds as we skated around the rink. It was a very special winter weekend for us.