Snowy Weekend

I know you expect me to write insightful stuff about life and everything in it and basically to complain about everything, and it's not that I don't have some thoughts about romance as shown in movies these days versus real life, marriage, kids and maternity, life on the move, etc., but Hidai said I am not allowed to write anything with profound meaning until I have a clean bill of health for a week. Since it seems I can't make it past the 3 days mark, and since I've just discovered it's Blue Monday today (isn't it wonderful to realize you have a scientific explanation to feeling down? It's not me! It's Blue Monday!),  guess it will stay unwritten for a while, and this post will be a light, fluffy, fun post about our weekend in the snow.

It is not the first time we've seen snow (I have to say that because many people assumed it was), it's not even the first time we've seen snow in London, since we were lucky enough to be here last February, and go through the tourists-stuck-in-the-snow flights-delayed part of snow (wasn't really fun, but Ron did managed to meet the pilot and the crew was great and the plane did take-off after just one hour delay). But we've never lived in a place that has snow. We've never lived in a place where you can actually look outside your windows and see snow falling, where you can go downstairs and play in the snow. Where you have to worry about schools being open, and buses running.
London doesn't get a lot of snow (apparently), and the amount of people outside playing and taking photos made me feel a little better - hey it's not just us getting all excited because of the snow, everybody loves the snow.
It started falling on Friday morning, continued for much of the day, took a day off for most of Saturday and then came back for more than 16 hours straight on Sunday.

Evolution of snow - from Friday morning to Monday morning

We were all very excited about all this snow, and on Saturday morning we took advantage of the fact that it wasn't snowing and less cold (everything in life is relative, isn't it?) we got dressed as if it was, and went outside to play in the snow. We were actually the first in the building to go outside to play, so we had all this uninterrupted snow to play around in. Of course the kids wanted to start with a snowball fight, so we obliged...

After that we tried our hand at snowman building, which turned out to be a bit tricky. As it were, snowman building is not such a hard thing to do (mainly for me, I just stood there taking pictures) but it's a technique we were not familiar with and that is what we got at first:

Yon was very happy with it.
But after Ron remembered the appropriate way in which one is supposed to build a snowman (he practiced it at school on Friday), we managed to build a quite respectable snowman -

On Sunday it was snowing all day, so we spent the morning just watching all the people that braved the snow and copied our snowman :). Actually this being a complex full of "young professionals" i.e people without kids and a lot of free time to play in the snow, and also apparently with artistic aspirations, we now have a gigantic snowman, a sitting snowman, a snow-dog, and a snow penguin that took them hours to make.
Hidai and the kids braved the cold in the afternoon and went outside to vent their Arsenal frustration (another day another lost match) by throwing snowballs at each other for about an hour.

Yes, I know you can't see, but these are Hidai and the kids

We closed the snow weekend with pizza & ice-cream (not on budget, not fit for diet, and we felt so bad for the delivery guy we gave him a 5 pounds tip) as comfort food and Man In Black 3 (surprisingly fun I have to say. Much better than all the romantic comedies we watched this weekend. Don't get me started on the movies-today topic. It was supposed to be a lighter post), and woke up this morning to some light snow, school is open (for now) and everything outside is still a sea of glorious white.

As I am writing this the snow is starting to melt (very very slowly, since it's still freezing cold), and I can't help but feel a bit sad about it. We've had a lovely weekend, and I still feel that snow is like magic, that seeing everything covered in a layer of white, fluffy and shiny snow is magic. I will miss it, but in some ways it's like the snow is a weekend magic, it doesn't belong on a Monday. Monday is back to reality day, where I have to deal with the school-runs and unfortunately I discovered that if you are lacking in the equilibrium department on sunny days, it is probably not a good idea for you to walk around on ice, with Hidai's yet another busy week (just so you won't think badly of him, because of point a above, he is in charge of the school runs today), with the new tasks I have to do now that I finished writing my big new page of how to move to London, which was something I wanted to do ever since I started this blog and took me 6 months to finish, and now I need to move to new tasks on my list (yes, I have a list, you can't really say you're surprised).

Okay, so I am going to close this post with a quote I found while looking for something else, because I think Big Life Changing Quotes are just the thing for posts like this one -
There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle (Albert Einstein).

Snowing it on Saturday