The Meltdown

Only two days after our skating adventure everything began to change.

Snow began to sag, water droplets hung on branches, the breeze became warm... and..

ice began to melt.  Well, a little, but the ice on the pond was still very thick (4 to 5 inches thick that is), so Josiah and I took on the task of cutting the ice around the pond so that it would be free to float up when the expected flood came the next day.  We cut a total of 110 feet around the pond.  Talk about sore muscles!!

And the flood sure did come!!  My little duck families were absolutely thrilled to go swimming before breakfast, in their own pens!!

Silly Ducks!

As expected, the ice on the pond floated, creating a wonderful ice raft.  So Josiah and Faith rafted around on the ice flow, and I stayed in the more stable and less slippery canoe, sometimes joined by Sadie Rose! We had fun re-enacting both Eliza from "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (sprinting across breaking ice flows) and the Titanic (accidentally running the canoe into hidden "icebergs" thankfully it never actually sunk :)

The duckies came out on the big pond too, but they really preferred the shallow parts where they could dabble in the mud underneath.

A week before the meltdown Aunt Carmen gave us two snow tubes, since our tubes from last year had sustained fatal injuries on the sled runs, and were out of commission.  Well, before we got the chance to use the snow tubes for what they were created for, we had "the meltdown".   Not wanting to waste the wonderful gifts, we did what any creative and slightly backwoods people would do.  We used them as water tubes!!!  They floated wonderfully; the only problem being that they were almost impossible to control. :P

We squeezed as much fun as we could out of the flooding before everything froze later that week!  God truly has a sense of humor with all these fluctuations in temperature!!

~Chs