Snow Day! {New Braunfels Photography}

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Originally uploaded by lisablaschke

Last week hell froze over. Well, not exactly. More like South Texas froze over, but it only falls slightly cooler than hell on the scale of hotness in the middle of summer. So it's pretty rare to get a snow day in these parts. My daughter prayed for it. She talked about it nonstop for days, peaking out the window in the middle of the night, every night, watching and waiting. All the while I stood by and told her not to get her hopes up too high. The chances were pretty small.

But her prayers were heard. We got about half an inch at our house, preceded by hours of freezing rain so the roads were nice and slick when the snow settled on top of the ice.

We ventured out at the crack of dawn and made snow angels in the only spot with snow deep enough to register any imprint -- the sidewalk. My daughter built a tiny little snowman no bigger than a Barbie doll and scraped up most of the snow on the sidewalk to do that. She pelted me with "snowballs" that were more accurately described as fistfulls of frost. School was canceled for the day, of course. Many of our northern friends questioned the reasoning behind canceling school with half an inch of snow, but then, we question why they complain about a week of 90-degree heat in the middle of summer and call it a "dangerous heat wave." We call a that a cold front.

The roads were slick with ice and I saw a handful of cars spinning out on the roads trying to get out of the neighborhood. We don't own snow tires, we don't own chains, we don't know how to drive in this stuff. We don't even know what it is we need to drive in this.

I had hoped to get to go out and shoot the scenery in San Antonio. The Missions under snow sound beautiful. But when it came down to it, I didn't want to get out there. And even if I did, the interstates were closed as well as most of the back roads and sitting at home sounded like so much more fun. The snow was gone by noon except a small little patch in the shadow of the house.

We put chili in the crockpot and watched The Day After Tomorrow -- now there's a snow storm.

This weekend was gorgeous. Sunny and in the 60s. We kicked the A/C on in the car when it got a bit toasty. The temps are only going up from here, I believe. We got our token week of winter weather. The kids got to take the tags off their Christmas mittens for one day, but now it's time to put them away for a while.