Snowman a was there Once

A policeman took the picture for us.

After admiring our morning's work, we decided to try to get a picture of our family around the snowman. Ryan hooked a folding chair through the chain link fence, used my mittens to hold it steady, and then tried to set my camera up on a thinner glove so it would stand upright. At that point, the policemen, having finished checking into things across the parking lot, walked back to their cars. 

 After things died down and the angry guy left our front yard, we dutifully traipsed back outside to put the finishing touches on our snowman. Ryan had a cool idea for the mouth, but it turns out that Sharpie does not work well on broken taco shells. Who knew? We eventually found enough stuff in our yard to give the snowman a proper face, once we convinced Sam that the Tootsie Pop nose belonged to the snowman and he would be sad if someone else ate it. Too bad the police cars lined up in front of our house made it impossible to see our cheery snowman from the street.
While on the phone with the police, I looked out the window (and what did I see? ha ha ha) to see the guy talking loudly and angrily to Ryan in our front yard. I tried to stay calm on the phone, but I was definitely scared that there was going to be some roughhousing. Meanwhile, Sam, always dependable, started yelling that he wanted to go outside and play with Daddy and the snowman. Not wanting the dispatcher to think that I was abusing my child, I bribed him to be quiet with a piece of Toblerone. Yes, I ate one too.
Ryan urged me and Sam to go inside and call the police (because, as I've mentioned before on this blog, I have the SSL police dispatch number in my phone). I had to hoist Sam under one arm to get him to go inside, which is not an easy thing to do while 31 weeks pregnant. Once inside, I decided to leave all our snow clothes on, on the off chance that we would get to go outside again soon. Sam ran away from me and hid in the tent he got for Christmas.

We had a great time in the snow. Sammy kept throwing snowballs at us and the snowman, and occasionally asking one of us to breathe on his face to warm it up. Ryan had done a great job of stacking three balls of snow for the snowman, and I contributed by wiping off most of the pine needles and shaping the snow. We were brainstorming ideas on how to dress up our creation when we heard yelling. That's not too unusual, actually, at the government-housing across the parking lot from us. This time, though, the man and woman yelling at each other were also shoving each other and cursing. I tried to get Sam to stay in the front yard with me, away from the noise, but he kept wanting to run away and see what Daddy was looking at.
After we watched Cars and ate our breakfast smoothies, we got dressed to go play in the snow. My snowboarding pants refused to button around my baby-expanded waist, but the belt buckle held them up nonetheless. Sam was absolutely delighted by the swish-swish noises his legs made when he walked in his snowpants. And even Ryan put on his heavy winter coat instead of just donning a long-sleeved shirt. We asked Sam if he wanted to build a snowman, which got him excited. All bundled up, we hurried outside to enjoy the rare treat that has been snow in SLC this winter.
This morning we woke up to find the front yard covered in snow.