Blizzard 2016

As you may have noticed, things have been pretty quiet over here on the blog for the past week. That's because Victor, Max, Victor's parents, and I traveled to the Tampa area of Florida for a little mid-winter vacation. I'll post more on that later this week. Perhaps more notable is the fact that we cut our trip short by 2 days so we could make it home in time for #Blizzard2016.

Beautiful sunsets from our condo each night

Yes, we realize that we may have been crazy to leave the *slightly* warmer Florida weather (it was only in the 50s and 60s while we were there) to come home to a huge snowstorm, but we had our reasons. We switched our flight from Saturday to Thursday, giving us time to get home and hit the grocery store before the snow started Friday afternoon.

We jumped outside to take some pics as the snow started falling, and then we sat at home as Mother Nature dumped upwards of 30 inches of snow in our yard over the course of 34 hours (it snowed nonstop from Friday afternoon till late Saturday night). That's over 2.5 feet of the white fluffy stuff. Guys, don't get me wrong, I love snow, but this is excessive. I think we got an entire winter's worth of snow in one day. Good thing it's pretty.

This was around 2 pm on Friday Jan. 22

Thankfully, we never lost power, which was a big fear due to the forecast high winds. We watched movies, played in the snow, had some family jam sessions with Max's collection of instruments, and Victor did lots of shoveling and snowblowing. I stayed inside and did laundry, cooked meals, and baked banana bread. I honestly would've loved to help shovel and put in some manual labor/burn some calories (seriously, that's a lot of snow for Victor to move by himself), but I've been put on restricted activity orders due to my low-lying placenta. No heavy lifting or strenuous activity for this mama!

This was around 10:40 am on Saturday, Jan. 23.

In the end, it was good that we came home early to prepare for the snow. We have a clear-ish driveway, we had fun family time together, and we got to play in the winter wonderland before it got to be too deep to enjoy (seriously, it's kind of no fun now. As I said earlier, excessive).

Sledding isn't quite the same in so much snow, but Max doesn't know any better, so it's all fun for him.

We ventured out on the roads this morning to see how the town looked. We live on a main road, so our street was plowed early on. However, this morning, we noticed that several neighborhoods and side streets haven't even seen a plow yet, so their residents are still very much snowed in. The roads are looking ok, but a lot more work still needs to be done to get back to "normal." After seeing what the roads look like today, I think I'll wait until Wednesday or Thursday to venture out by myself with Max.

If you found yourself in Snowstorm Jonas' path last weekend, I hope you're warm and safe with your loved ones! If you were far away from the snow, enjoy living life normally this week!