For the Love of a Snow Day

 

Who doesn’t love a snow day? It’s the best feeling in the world.

For a kid.

It’s not a Saturday or a holiday or a winter break day or a summer day. It emits its own particular rhythm and magic.

On a normal school day, your kids would be sitting at breakfast in a vegetative state. But not on a snow day. They are overcome with Christmas-like enthusiasm. Leaping, cheering, high-fiving, squealing in delight. Your kids have never wanted to play outside before like they do today.

You are compelled to answer urgent requests for winter gear, undisturbed for 12 months and likely unwearable.

You climb into the attic, still in jammies and thinking about your warm bed. You sit on the cold floor, digging through tubs of outerwear, holding up ski pants, reading the tags, assessing the straps of bibs and the size of every boot–do you have enough things to fit them?

You pull on sweats and hit slick roads deemed too dangerous for traveling to school,so you can race to Wal-Mart to purchase the last remaining boots on the shelves.  You through in some more gloves and some ski pants. While you’re there, you fight some moms for bread and milk.

Then you’re back home. Don’t complain about the color. It’s all they had.

You help your kids pull on thick socks, ski pants, coats, boots, hats, gloves. Adjusting, zipping, tying, pulling, while they debate the need to wear all of it. You’re wearing this. I just risked my life to buy it.

You squeeze into ski pants that somehow are tighter than last year. Turtleneck, jacket, hat, gloves, boots. You pack snacks, water bottles, hot chocolate in a thermos that will leak in the back seat.

Then you’re back in the car, on streets already melting under traffic and sun, with children like stuffed animals in their seatbelts, complaining about feeling itchy. You find the biggest hill, covered with sled runs from the early risers, icy where kids have flown down the hill.

Your kids watch other kids belly-flopping, swirling in circles, riding snowboards, building ramps. They are agitated with excitement.

You all sled. Up and down the hill. Over and over.

You spin. You crash. You tumble. You laugh.

Your fingers lose all feeling, and your cheeks sting in the wind.

When the snacks are gone, and everyone is hungry and has to use the bathroom, you agree to go home.

Then you go back home, cheeks red, eyes watering, toes frozen, mittens soaked through.

Your kids happy from playing with their siblings, happy to be out of school, happy to fly downhill under a brilliant blue sky.

They’re happy you’re their mom (even if they don’t consciously realize it). You realize it. That’s enough.

Then the snow gear comes off, puddling on floor and rug, a big heap of wet, heavy clothing and a trail of water.

The kids eat like you’ve never fed them before and settle into games until hyperactivity overtakes them, and you shoo them back outside. But not before all the pulling on of socks, ski pants, coats, boots, hats, and gloves.

Adjusting, zipping, tying, pulling, debating, correcting, and pushing them out the door.

They complain about feeling itchy and shed their hats and coats the moment you close the door behind them. You give them carrots and tell them to make snowmen. They do. They make snow angels and forts and roll in the snow until the green grass smiles in strips like railroad tracks across the yard.

Then a snowball fight ensues. Then tears. Then someone stomps inside. Everyone else follows.

Snow gear comes off, puddling on floor and rug, a big heap of wet, heavy clothing and a trail of brown water.

Red cheeks, runny noses, staticky hair.

Tired bodies nestle together quietly on the couch, subdued, eating fresh cookies and drinking hot chocolate while you load the washer with wet clothes and empty the dryer of dry bibs and coats and hats and gloves and pants and socks and shirts. You mop up the floors and line up the boots on a big towel in the front hall.

You make dinner. You are also cold and tired and itchy. But you have nobody to complain to, even if you wanted to. And those children you love are drifting into a snow day coma on the couch.

You run baths and clean up dinner and read stories and change the laundry a hundred times and fold it on the dining room table and tuck children into bed. You sink exhausted onto the couch, posting the day’s memories on Instagram and scrolling through everyone else’s snow day pictures. You notice all the happy hashtags.

You wouldn’t trade today for any other day of the year. For the love of a snow day, it was worth all the work.

But you hope there’s school tomorrow.