Let it snow...

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and a Happy New Year. Seems like so long ago now as I sit here in my hotel room in Chicago. But a good time was had by all...especially the kids. Charlie racked up as usual and still clamors for more toys. Little does Sarah know that I continue to buy him new ones. Just don't tell her.

But during the Christmas break, we had to find things to do with Charlie to keep him entertained and to tire him out. So my sister finds out that at Atlantic Station (an outdoor mall here in Atlanta), they were having a "Winter Wonderland" in the central courtyard that included snow. So the Tuesday before Christmas, we decided to go check this out with Charlie and my sister's family. All the kids (Charlie, Corrine and Caitlin) talked about on the way to the Winter Wonderland was about the snow. "I'm going to build a snowman!" "I'm going to throw a snowball." "Should we have brought along our sled?" You get the picture...just imagine it over and over again.

Well, we get there just in time since the actual "snowfall" took place once every hour on the hour. We find a parking space and rush over to the courtyard in order to have fun in the snow...which we here in Atlanta haven't seen in over 3 years. We finally make our way to the courtyard and...there's white stuff floating in the air. More like someone with very bad dandruff shaking their head in a fan. In each corner of the courtyard, the folks at Atlantic Station had set up snow blowers that produced random specs of simulated snow. There was no snow on the ground...not an inch to be found. And the "snow" that was blowing was more like a bad dust up. Granted, the kids ran around like it was the best thing since sliced bread.

But after 15 minutes, the blowers stopped, and the snow ended. However, in 45 more minutes, the snow would blow again and the kids would be in heaven for another 15 minutes. What's another 45 minutes to wait so that the kids had their fun? So we stuck around another 45 minutes, getting pretty darn cold since it was 2 days before Christmas. 8 o'clock rolls around and the kids stand patiently by the blowers. We hit 8:15 and still no snow. What gives? Turns out that the "on the hour" part was only valid on the weekends...not any old Tuesday night. So far all our trouble and time (at this point about 2.5 hours), all we had to show for it was 15 minutes of the girl from the "Breakfast Club" shaking her head violently to produce fake snow.

Maybe next time, we'll research the event before just heading out there.