Keeping It Simple: A Igloo

Friday afternoon the boys came rushing home from school with one thing on their minds - get out in that snow, the weekend is here! We had a few inches on the ground, the wet kind, great for packing. As I glanced out my office window I saw Brandon starting to create an outline on the ground. He used the red snowball maker he'd received for Christmas last year and began creating perfectly round snowballs with it. I heard his little voice call up to my office. "Mom, I'm building a igloo." The perfect vision of a little boy with big plans. One you want to freeze forever (no pun intended).

As the afternoon went on he made more snow balls and started piling them up. The igloo took on a long oval shape and spanned about 5 feet. When it was time to come in for the day he asked if he could work on it again tomorrow. "Sure buddy, you can build more and I will try to help."

After our Saturday morning routine he dressed in his full snow garb and headed out to the yard once again. I joined him after awhile and found he had created a huge pile of snowballs. (note to self, if I'm in the igloo building business I need some snow pants)

He had figured out if he made a bunch of them he could spend more time building. So we worked for about an hour. He was making more snowballs and I was placing them around structure. At one point he took his sled to an area of fresh snow, filled it with snowballs and returned to our building site. Our igloo was starting to take on quite a nice shape. After a short break for lunch he was back at it again. I joined him for about another hour and when we stepped back to admire our work we were up to about 7 rows of snowballs. We took a few pictures and talked about spending some more time working on it Sunday.

Sunday came and so did the bright sunshine and rising temperatures. The snow was still around but when I checked the forecast I had a feeling our building might not make it to sunset. Before our house was very active Brandon had his snow clothes back on and trudged out to the backyard. Jim had to leave fairly early for a flight but went out to help his little buddy a bit. He introduced him to the concept of the spray bottle. Wetting down the snowballs in the hope of creating a more solid structure. After Jim came back in house Brandon kept at it. Adding a few snowballs and wetting them down with his re purposed Windex bottle.

As the day went on the walls started falling in certain areas and Brandon grew frustrated that his igloo kept breaking. I did my best to patch the walls but the beautiful sunny day wasn't working in our favor. I explained that we would make it as strong as we could and then we needed to leave it alone for awhile and just see how much remained after the day. I said we have a good base and the next time it snows we can build it up again.

Before the sun set we looked out and a lot of our hard work had melted away. You could still see the outline and a few of the snowballs were in tact creating the oval shape - but our 7 layers were now more like 1. When he went to bed last night Brandon got teary when he talked about how hard we had worked and that it all just melted away. He said, "Mom, even when my tummy was grumbling I wanted to keep going because we were having so much fun building. And now, it's all going to be gone."

What a hard lesson, especially because I was a little sad too. I told him I took a bunch of pictures and when it snows again we can go back out and build it back up. That's the trouble with snow, I guess. It's not real permanent.

I just checked the forecast. 80% chance of snow starting tomorrow afternoon...