Sweat and Smarts

As a long awaited break in the frigid temperatures broke this weekend we were pleased to welcome in warm breezes and high suns on Saturday Morning. We were the first ones on the sledding hill on Saturday morning. Apparently the rest of the world felt that the best sledding wasn't during the eight o'clock hour. The hill was really fast after a relatively dry month that saw little snow making for an ice slicked slope. Sophia was happy to race Merrick and I, and really enjoyed steering her sled at us so that I would have to jump over her. Merrick loves hitting the jumps and has no patience for waiting until the sled has slowed down before demanding that we go again. Of course in his world it is still possible to sled down and up the hill. After a quick lunch and a brief nap we headed out for a short hike. The hike included a climb up a pretty significant hill which afford a nice view of a wildlife sanctuary and some windy perches upon Aldo Leopold benches. We called it a hike although to everyone else we were likely just the strange family walking around the municipal compost dump. Sunday Morning we opted to augment our athletic outings with something a little more refined and headed downtown to check out all of the ice and snow sculptures from the previous evening Winterfest activities. The kids thought these were really cool, literally. I did not feel bad about them touching the works of art either. These snow and ice sculptures did make my backyard snow tunnels seem a little...well lacking. From the Sculptures we headed straight to the outdoor rink. The ice was really in great condition--as expected given the cold temperatures and lack of snow of the previous weeks. Merrick opted for boots rather than his skates and Sophia was mostly content to just skate sans stick. It really felt good for me to knock a puck around on the ice and shoot at an actual net. Merrick and I passed the puck for quite a while and he was ready to stay on the ice all day. And Sophia got plenty of puck time at her practice on Sunday evening, managing to find time between scoring goals to come over to the glass to double check that I was keeping a proper tally.