This past weekend ...

Snow. That about sums up my weekend in a word. Not taking the kids to the park or installing my new bird feeders or setting up the worm composter or any of the other things I had planned to do this past weekend. Those will have to wait for a weekend with less snow.

I am so ready for the snow to end. I know it is only mid-April, and that it's too early to expect the snow to be over already. After all, in the four years I have been in Alberta, there has always been snow on my birthday, which is at the end of April. But this particular winter has been so incredibly mild that I began to think that maybe this year ...

Alas, for the past four weeks in a row the snow has melted, only to fall again a few days later. At this point, rain would be a novelty. 

So this past weekend, once again, we donned our winter jackets and pulled our snow boots back out of storage, and went outside to tromp through the snow. We followed animal tracks. We splashed in puddles. And we "painted the snow purple" as Colin likes to say about squirting the ground with his little spray bottle full of coloured water. (Try this at home! Just don't try red ... or yellow for that matter.)

And while these photos were not actually taken "this past weekend"--I was much to depressed to pull out my camera just to take more pictures of the snow -- they sum up fairly accurately exactly what our weekend looked like ... and the past 20 weekends as well.

Did I mention I'm really ready for the snow to end?