Snow in October....early October

On Saturday day morning I woke up to snow. Then I laid back down for a moment to brace myself and then sat back up and peered out of the window in disbelief. I know they had predicted snow, but predicting and having are two different things. I suddenly felt like I should be Christmas shopping, even though we just got all of our Halloween decorations up Sunday afternoon.

Keegan of course was thrilled and greeted me with the questions "Is it Christmas now? Is Santa bringing presents?" Of course after breakfast we had to go out and play in the snow right away! Luckily the new boots I had ordered for Keegan came Friday afternoon (Yay, for Amazon Prime 2 day shipping). Unfortunately his new coat is still on the way. Lucky for us, his coat and snow pants from last year just barely fit him.

First thing to do was make a snow angle. Which was a bit confusing to Keegan at first but he got the hang of it pretty quickly with some guidance from daddy.


Then we went back to the backyard. The sight was a bit disturbing. There was snow all over the wildflowers by the lake, I took some pictures below. Oh and, of course, the boat and dock are still in the lake. We usually don't take the boat out until November, but well...we were caught a bit by surprise.




Wait let's back up for a second. Did I mention that last week I was washing shorts in the laundry? Two weeks ago we had some days in the mid-80's. Okay so now we need full mittens, boots, hats, etc. Wow...it was like weather whiplash. A bit of an extreme change, even for MN.

Well after our snow fun it was time to do something new and exciting (besides make snow angles the second week of October). Our library has a cool program called Museum Adventure Pass, I don't know if all counties have something like this but our library does.

There is a large display with a ton of museums in the Twin Cities area; each museum has a description and pocket below it with laminated tags in it. To use this service you take a laminated tag out of a pocket on the display and bring it up to the counter to "check out". The tag gets you two free passes to the museum in question. The passes are good for a week. What a cool way to check out some of the stranger MN museums? Or you can also get passes for the Walker, the Zoo, the Science Museum, etc. and many other more popular museums.

So there were two museums in the display that we hadn't been too. The first was the Firefighters Hall and Museum in Minneapolis. The second was The Works (Hands On) Museum. We opted to go to the Firefighters Museum. So after our snow fun, we headed out to the Firefighters Museum...which will be called the FFM from now on :-)

Little did we know it was "get in free day" (the only free day of the year) and they were doing lots of fun activities. They also had lots of volunteers on site to explain everything to us. It ended up being a lot more fun than we thought it would be. See pictures below.

There was one Firetruck you could climb into and operate the lights and horns. Keegan and I did this one and got a kick out of it.


Here's a view of the museum from up on the back of the fire truck.


Here is Lyle operating a water hose gun thing. It was pretty cool, you could move it up and down and rotate it and everything.


The next three pictures are of modules that they had set up for kids. On these mini-firetruck modules the kids could climb in and operate the firetruck (horns and all). They had a video screen set up so that it looked like the kids were actually backing up, driving down the street, and putting out fires! They also had cloths for kids to try on, a huge train table, model firetrucks, and lots of neat pictures of past fires. We weren't expecting much, but it was way more fun than we thought it was going to be! I recommend it, especially if you have a toddler that loves firetrucks :-)






So it was fun. On Sunday we went to the MN Zoo. Guess what the snow was gone, but at temps in the low 30's there definitely wasn't a crowd to fight. The neat thing was that the chilly temperatures made all the animals really active. So we got to see lots of activity while we were there.

Then we get to Monday. Would you believe I wake up and we are under a Winter Storm Advisory? So more snow. I had to take some visitors out to dinner tonight for work, so Lyle and Keegan were left to fend for themselves. When I pulled in the driveway a big beautiful snowman greeted me :-) Keegan was very proud of what he and daddy had done. Oh, I should mention that this morning Keegan was literally bouncing with joy at the sight of more snow. Again the question was, "Mommy, now is Santa coming?" I reminded him that we have Halloween to celebrate still, and really that is a holiday that we don't want to miss out on!