Saturday!

I'm not even bothering trying to wake up early on weekends. I see no point. Maybe if I see a huge improvement from waking up early during the week, I'll eventually try weekends, but not in the foreseeable future.

Anyway, yesterday we spent some time up at our property with a bunch of friends eating a turkey and letting the kids play in the snow.  It was such a great day and exactly what I needed.  The weather was near 50 and sunny, but there was still plenty of snow so the kids weren't playing in the mud.

Two of our friends are in the process of building cabins nearby, all within walking distance of each other, so when we go up to our property we can just let them roam and play all day. Everyone loves it. It was relaxing to me because I don't think I yelled at the kids once during the day. Which made a huge difference to my entire day. I wasn't grumpy or annoyed. I was happy and they were happy. I even noticed a difference in the way we all treated each other when we got home and had a few hours of hanging out before bedtime. It really gave me some great motivation to work harder to stop the yelling in our house.

Of course, I also feel bad for letting them get such strange sunburns. I was prepared with sunscreen, but didn't do a great job of applying it. I have one of those sticks of sunscreen for their faces that looks like a large thing of Chapstick. When we first got there I rubbed some on their noses and cheeks and their foreheads. After that, I forgot about it the rest of the day because when it's only 50 degrees outside and there is still 2 feet of snow on the ground, sunscreen isn't something I think about.

It shows the best on Emily, but all of them look similar.  The little sections that I did remember to put the sunscreen on are fine, but the rest of their faces are fried. They look completely ridiculous and Emily is not looking forward to going to school tomorrow and I don't blame her. They do look pretty frightening.  I look similar, but I had sunglasses on all the day so my eyes don't look like theirs. But I do have some strange lines on my face as well.  My husband guesses that the sun reflecting off the snow had something to do with it because when they get sunburned in the summer they don't ever get burned around their eyes like that. (Not that they are getting sunburned on a regular basis.)

Here's to doing a better job with the sunscreen as we start getting into warmer weather and also to working on having less yelling in our home.