Building a Sleet-man

"In the meadow we can build a sleetman..."

It just doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it?

I don't know about you, but where I live the Great Snowstorm of 2009 has now been officially classified as "A Total Rip-off" by my 10-year-old son and "The Most Horrible-est Day Ever" by my 5-year-old.

Many people today in America will remember today as a time of great hope -- Inauguration Day for Barack Obama. And maybe my 4 kids will get to that point eventually.

For now, though, they are just vividly disappointed in the lack of snowfall. We live in Lincoln County and unlike the schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg our boys' Lincoln Charter School isn't even closed today -- it's just delayed for two hours.

We try never to build the kids' hopes up on snow, since this is the way it works out so often in the Charlotte area. We keep away from the TV news -- Winter Storm Warning!! Winter Storm Warning!! -- when the snow may be approaching. We don't do milk-and-bread runs. Nevertheless, they hear about it somehow.

So this morning they jumped out of bed and started looking for their snowsuits, dreaming of making snow ice cream and snowballs. All that was on the ground here was a few miserable flecks of sleet, which dissuaded the other kids from going outside. No one wants sleet ice cream.

The 5-year-old wouldn't be deterred, though. He got dressed warmly, went outside and said maybe we could build "a little, tiny snowman" from the sleet. After realizing that the sleet wouldn't even stick together enough to build a snowman the size of 2 golf balls, he gave up and made his "Horrible-est Day" declaration.

There was an upside for the parents in all this, however. By 9:30 a.m., the kids were fighting. So we weren't too upset to send the school-bound ones onto their classes.