We're not giving in!

I have a confession...I HATE making snowmen. I love walking in the snow and I don't even mind snowball fights but snowmen building. Urgh! I think it's mainly because I have no patience and I want the thing to just appear, not have to faff around, rolling snow around for it to only fall apart just as you are putting its head on.

Normally, given the fact that snowman building is a blue job, I leave it to M. Thing is, we ended up stuck in traffic coming home from town yesterday when there was about 5cm of snow and 5m stupids who decided that they needed to drive 5mph so I couldn't delegate responsibility, given that it was almost dark when we finally got home.

Today we were supposed to have a busy day; after school I had to drop J and L off at home then go back to school before coming home and making tea for us and my Aunt. However, thanks to the snow, the meeting was cancelled and the Aunt decided that it was too snowy so we found ourselves with a free afternoon. I stupidly got all excited and told L that we would make a snowman when we got home.

First of all Lou got a wellie-full of snow so she had a full-on melt-down and screamed the street down because her foot was wet and cold. My emptying of the wellie did nothing but make her worse because I couldn't magically dry it. 'Luckily' however, our neighbour A.K.A Lou's adoptive Grandad came to see the farce, shook her boot and all was ok again.

After what felt like an hour of rolling a ball of snow around the garden, I lost the will to live and dumped the pathetic excuse for a snowman body in the corner of the garden. Lou took one look at it, marched over and said 'You're not just going to give in and leave that there, are you?' I suggested it would all look ok once she got her (pea-sized) head on which she dumped on. It promptly rolled off, smashed, Lou burst into tears, stomped on the body and burst into tears again.

At this point J decided that Harry Potter on the Wii beckoned and went inside. I tried to convince Lou that we could do the same, adding the bribe of hot chocolate but she shouted a bit more and informed me that 'We're not giving in!' so we had to start building the damn thing again.

So, we started again, me chuntering to myself about how it couldn't be that difficult to build a stupid snowman, maybe it was the wrong type of snow, maybe I could throw myself on the ground and fact a heart attack or something....I even considered bribing the lads who had decided that towing each other behind a car on a snowboard around the road was a great idea to build Lou a snowman but by this point my snowball had got a decent size and almost snowman body sized.

By now, much to Lou's distress, it was getting dark and she was proud of the fact that we hadn't given up even though it was so hard to make the stupid thing so it was all ok to put the head on, carefully this time, then dress him with his hand knitted hat and scarf.

Now I would like the Nobel prize for peacekeeping please ;)