Color the Snow

I'm so happy to report that as I write this, the snow is mostly melted, the temperature is in the high 40s, and I am planning to take the kids to a playground when I pick Cat and Jack up from school this afternoon.  My sweet older neighbor began predicting an early spring weeks before Punxsutawney Phil, noting the early presence of birds.  So whether it's the lack of a rodent seeing its shadow or birds arriving earlier than normal, I'm just happy to have some above freezing weather.  (We've gotten so used to the cold that when it was in the low 40s one day in February Cat said it felt like summer and asked if we could go swimming.)

But we had a couple of fun snow things we did in the back yard that I wanted to share.  I'm even more happy to do so now that the snow is mostly gone, hopefully for good.

After we tried spraying the snow with colored water and it didn't go so well, I decided to buy a few squeeze bottles, you know, like the ones restaurants use for condiments.  Ben took the kids outside to squeeze colored water on to the snow and it worked much better than spraying.  It's kind of hard to see here, but there really are streaks of color in the snow.

This idea came from here.  Fill water balloons with colored water, freeze, peel off the balloons,

then decorate the yard.  The filling part was the hardest.  The balloons were too small to fit over

any of my faucets, so I finally ended up using the squeeze bottles I mentioned above.

The "decorating" fun didn't last as long as I thought it would, but Jack and Eliza still thought

it was cool.  And I enjoyed seeing the colors on the back deck until they melted away.

(Which I also enjoyed seeing...)