More Snow Days

We've had a lot of snow days this year.  Although I can't stand winter, I do secretly enjoy the indoor family days.  On Thursday we got enough snow that Sandra couldn't make it here so we played and played (aka trashed the house) all day.  We started the day by finding some extra wall paint and pieces of wood from the third floor construction zone and the boys went to work painting.  From there they created a fort in the living room, but then decided a mash pit might be more fun.  They found everything soft in the entire house - every pillow, every cushion, every blanket and every stuffed animal and dumped it on the living room floor.  They launched themselves from the barren sofa into the pillow pit.  We made a fire and toasted marshmallows.  Diego couldn't remember the word marshmallow so he kept referring to roasting "marshmush" or "mushrooms."  S'mores will now forever be marshmush around here.  And of course there was sledding and snowman building/destroying.

the living room mash pit

We thought we'd take advantage of the snow to go skiing over the weekend.  Carlos found a random place in WV which felt like another world, but the people couldn't have been nicer and the kids loved it.  They loved everything - right down to those crappy little machines that swallow your quarters and only sometimes spit out terrible trinkets and trash.  Charlie put his plastic "I'm-needlessly-killing-the-environment" toys into his treasure box when he got home.  We rounded Diego's age up a bit so that we could all go tubing on Saturday.  I was certainly more scared than they were.  While Charlie and Carlos went skiing on Sunday, Diego, Sofia and I spent the day in the pool, running the hotel hallways and clearing the outside furniture of snow....It was a fun time with the exception of all sleeping in one room - mainly because of Sofia.  For some reason she is nearly impossible to sleep with in the same room.  She was literally up from midnight to 3am wanting to play.  Only when I was absolutely sure that I was going to have a nervous breakdown did she finally pass out....

Sofia in her bathing suit!!!  she looked so cute. Diego took this photo

Our version of air hockey

For Valentine's day the kids tore open cards from Grandma and then used the stickers she sent to make us cards :).  They also got to work making and decorating cookies for Carlos (and themselves).   

Charlie dressed himself and this is how he came down for Valentine's Day

 

 It is a weird feeling to see my children surpass my current ability to do something.  Granted, I am totally "unmusical" so it's not very hard to surpass my abilities on the piano....Nevertheless, it was fun to watch Charlie play piano with his teacher last week: http://youtu.be/o-rWyHlysLg (also features Sofia grunting in the background).

A few more pictures of our indoor activities.

Watching the Olympics -- and ready for those ski jumps