In His Hands: April Showers Bring May...

...snow? Apparently we weren't done with winter yet. All the snow melted, the rivers broke up, and the sun shone beautifully. The roads dried out. We even went for a few walks without a coat! And then, with May, came MORE SNOW! Really?!
Thankfully it only sticks through the night, and always melts away by mid-morning, but everything is back to being soggy and muddy again. We went out for a Sunday drive and got the car stuck in the middle of a big puddle.

Luckily, we'd changed out of our nice church clothes and were both in jeans and boots. We stopped before we entered the puddle and I got out to do some reconnaissance. As I approached the water, I nearly sank to my ankles and hightailed it over to the bank on the edge of the road, scrambling through the brush as I tried to get to the other side. The reason I got out in the first place was to move some broken pallets stuck in the mud on the other side of the puddle... in hindsight, they probably were the relics of someone else's efforts to escape the mud pit. I was pretty worried we wouldn't make it through, but we'd already come through a puddle deep enough to push with our bumper, so we didn't want to risk going back and getting stuck in that one. At least this one didn't look as deep. Nate got out and seemed to made it straight across with less trouble than I'd had going around. We moved the boards, and I stood well back while Nate gave it a go.
Uhhh, yeah. Didn't work. Half way through, we stuck and spun up mud. Nate stopped before he dug us in any deeper, and there we were, in water four or five inches deep and mud below that. He got out and waded to the back to look things over. I waded in and unbuckled Eden's carseat, hauled it out, and took her to dry land. :) We weren't very far from home, so we weren't worried about us being stuck out in the cold, thankfully.

At that moment, a man came tramping up with his two dogs - out for an afternoon stroll - and surveyed the situation, made a few friendly comments, and suggested we leave it there overnight so the ground would re-freeze and be hard enough to drive out on. Nate didn't want to try that and have the car end up frozen to the ground, or the interior workings that had gotten wet frozen to each other. We put the baby seat between us, and sharing the weight (those things are heavy, and Eden's not known for her dainty size!) walked home. A close neighbor and one of Nate's co-workers drove by just as we neared the house and offered to help pull the car out. His truck wasn't very big, but with a thick anchor rope and the combined expertise of the two men, the car was out in a matter of minutes. I didn't see it; I was home with Eden making some dinner to finish off the fast Sunday.

And Eden has decided she loves tummy sleeping. She even tries to nurse in what used to be the side-lying position, but with her on her tummy. Doesn't work so well, but she keeps trying. She's initiated herself into the skill that opens up a whole new world, namely the undoing of velcro.