This is Living in Utah!

Freestone's weather indicator is stuck at "snow." Snowy? And how! There are snow drifts taller than Ruby out there! Yesterday, I looked out the window and saw Golda walking home from school. Ruby was crawling out of a big snow bank across the street. I thought she was hurt, but it turns out Golda and Ruby were having fun falling into the snow and digging back out. So that's what took them so long to get home yesterday.
Everything takes longer in the snow. For one thing, kids can't go directly from the car to the house or the house to the car. There has to be a big, slushy puddle or a mountain of snow involved somewhere along the way. And who invented GLOVES for kids? I don't think it's physically possible to get ten 2-year-old fingers into the right places in a pair of gloves. I tried to put socks on their hands, but they didn't like that, either.
Yesterday, for some insane reason, I decided to take 3 kids to the grocery store in a raging blizzard. I needed Great Northern White Beans for a recipe, and I had every kind of bean but. An hour later, Araceli and I were EACH pushing a fully loaded grocery cart through 5 inches of heavy, wet, dirty snow in blinding sleet. It was a big Quaker sale and I couldn't pass up the deals on school snacks. I think Xanthe went through two boxes of granola bars in the time it took me to get from the store to the car, so it's a good thing I stocked up. Anyway, the soup turned out good, and I am convinced that no other kind of bean would have worked. (Thanks for the best cookbook ever, Sarah! "Favorites" is fab.)