Winter Storm Atlas!

 

 Winter came a little early this year!  The weathermen had been threatening that a "strong winter storm" was aiming for the Black Hills and Western South Dakota for a few days, but I don't think anyone was prepared for what Mother Nature had in store!!  It rained all day Thursday and changed to snow at about 3 am Friday morning.  I decided to just stay home from work, since school was canceled for the boys.  It's a good thing I did, because I may not have made it back home!  Scott was able to get his route all done and make it home before the interstate closed and travel became absolutely impossible!

The boys doing a little shoveling before it became a full fledged blizzard!

nice snowball!

The snow was sooo heavy and wet, and did a number on all of the trees!

Tyson working on his snowman

Can you see me Aiden?

All done...minus a face and arms! :)

Aiden looks like he may be in trouble!

 We just snuggled in for the long haul Friday afternoon and night.  The electricity went off for about an hour between 7-8pm, and then was on the rest of the time.  We were very lucky!  There were thousands of people that had no power for days...Marla and Tony lost power Friday morning at 11am and did not get it back until Tuesday night at 5pm!  After all was said and done we had somewhere between 26-32 inches of snow!!!  I have never seen that much snow.....EVER!!  I wish I would have taken pictures of our front door and garage door.  The snow drift covered the entire door!  Saturday morning the snow stopped and the oh so fun job of digging out started!

The boys helping dad shovel....or not!

 Our wonderful neighbor Bob (the boys babysit his 3 dogs fairly frequently while he is on business trips)  has a snow blower and he let us use it!  If he hadn't God only knows when we would have gotten dug out!  Jeb, Cody, and the girls came over late Saturday morning to hang out.  They walked through 5 foot drifts to get to our house, but then at least we were able to play games and visit since there was absolutely not travel allowed!  They stayed the entire day, and it was a great way to spend the time.  The kids had a blast playing together!  The boys helped to get the drinks ready for the day....:)  I promise they also added a full box of juice boxes for them and the girls to share! :)  I just didn't get a picture of that!

So proud of their work!

The boys didn't have school on Monday either, and finally made it back to school on Tuesday.  The damage to all of the mature trees was devastating, and the cattle loss was terrible!  Atlas truly was a storm for the decades!  I hope it isn't a sign of what our winter is going to look like!