Fischer in our front yard the day after Christmas
He kept walking into the snow drifts, but got stuck every time!
A random fall tree amidst all the winter snow
Here Dustin takes Fischer for his first ride down the hill...Grandma follows right after. You can't hear Fischer in the video, but right after she finishes sledding he says, "E-maw, what doing?" (Grandma, what are you doing?)...he thought she was crazy!
A clip of Fischer's first encounter with snow:
And now the story of my first snowfall...also my first blizzard...also my first time getting stuck in a snow bank in the middle of nowhere. It's a long story, so you won't hurt my feelings if you don't read it:
We went to Duncan, Oklahoma (about 1 hr 15 min away) on the 23rd and planned on staying all day of Christmas Eve, but when we got up that morning, the weather reports were looking pretty grim. We decided to leave right after breakfast and beat the storm home (which you can probably guess by now that didn't happen!)
Just so you know we aren't crazy, this is what it looked like when we left OK around 9:45am:
A little ways into the drive it started snowing, a real pretty snow that I was enjoying since I have never seen snow falling before. Then it started snowing harder and harder...then the wind was blowing the snow sideways! But we were still going safely b/c Patrick's car has traction control tires (it's a fancy Lexus).
We finally crossed the Texas border, but by this time is was snowing real hard and we were passing cars and trucks stuck on the side of the road about every 500 ft or so. Thankfully there weren't any accidents b/c everyone was driving so slow. Then we started sliding a little here and a little there. We were about 20 miles outside of town when if finally happened...we slid sideways and got stuck. Dustin's pushing didn't help, so we started thinking of what we should do.
Just a few minutes after getting stuck, a big 4-wheel-drive diesel rancher's truck stopped next to us and two giant cowboys jumped out. They (along with one other man who stopped for a few minutes) managed to get the car turned straight and back on the road, but when put in drive we just slid right off the road again. So the men pushed the car completely off the road into a neighbor's drive, saying they knew the man and he wouldn't mind us leaving the car there.
One of the cowboys' grandmother (Nanny) lived just a few hundred feet down the road, so he first took Fischer and me, followed later by Dustin and Patrick to her house to warm up. They said they probably wouldn't have stopped at all if they hadn't seen we had a baby with us (which is true...we wanted to stop several times to help other people, but would have just ended up stuck ourselves, making more of a mess). Fischer made himself at home, since Nanny had lots of toys lying around for him to play with and Cheesy Puffs for him to snack on! We all got warm and waited for Travis (Dustin's dad) to come get us in his big pick-up truck. It took about an hour for a 20 mile drive in the storm, but he made it...they went and got some of our bags from the car and the carseat, then we loaded up and took the hour-long drive through a blizzard back home. It was 3:00pm at this point (we were pretty lucky...some people spent the whole night on another highway that had a jack-knifed semi on a bridge blocking everything...nothing like waking up Christmas morning in your car!)
Needless to say, we were very glad to be home...only to find that our power was out!! Thankfully, we have a gas heater in the fireplace and gas water heater, so we were able to warm up the living room and take warm baths. The power came on about an hour later, so we were finally able to relax! It was a Christmas Eve I'll never forget! At least we got to enjoy the snow on Christmas day, since the storm was gone and the sun was out.
And just so you know, this isn't typical north Texas weather. While it does snow a little bit every year, it rarely ever sticks to the ground longer than a day. Everyone our age says they can't remember a snow like this one...and the paper said Wichita Falls hasn't had a white Christmas in 83 years!
By the way, when I say we were "lucky," that's just an expression...I know it was God watching over us the whole time!
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