let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

Austin has such weird weather. Yesterday was a really pleasant day. Jeans and t-shirt weather. In fact, I was out until about 5:00 yesterday afternoon, very comfortable in jeans and a t-shirt. Then about when we were putting the boys in bed, I heard it starting to pour rain outside. Weird, it hadn't looked like rain before.
Then this morning when I woke up, I looked out my bedroom window and saw this:


(well, not this exactly, Mosey was still inside in his PJ's, but we did see snow on the deck!!)

The boys were thrilled. Joseph went out immediately to try to make a snow angel, but the snow was really sort of a crusty ice, no good for snow angels. The last time the boys "saw" snow was 2 years ago when Austin had a freak ice storm 2 weeks after we moved in. It didn't really snow then either, just a few flakes. But we had 2 inches of ice on the ground.
Anyway, they were very excited, but soon got VERY cold (Mosey came in just after I snapped this picture and changed his clothes, LOL).
We spent the rest of the day inside, warm and toasty. Man, am I NOT cut out for cold weather! A few days of this is fine for the diversion, but any more than that? No thank you!

On a different note, here's another fun science project/Christmas craft. We learned about growing crystals by making Christmas ornaments! Dissolve a bunch of borax in boiling water, and then suspend pipe-cleaners bent into Christmas shapes into jars of the solution. Within an hour or so, the borax crystals start forming. They're very sturdy and pretty!


Here's one of the shapes that got too crystallized to be able to get out of the jar. Oops!


The borax makes large, pretty crystals.



And here's some of the ornaments we made, hung up in my kitchen window. I took (too many) pretty, sparkly closeups of them too, but won't bore you. Try it! It's fun and easy! And not too messy, either, which is a HUGE plus. (and you see the plant on the left? That's our bean plant that is now about 2 feet high. We germinated it from a pinto bean and it is growing in a jar with a paper towel and water. It still amazes me that it grew out of nothing but water, air, and sunlight. Science is cool.)