Here are five truths about parenting on snow days…

As the country is currently in the grips of SNOWMAGEDDON, aka the Beast from the East aka Storm Emma aka alll the weather from the past fifty winters all come at once, what better subject is there than parenting on snow days?

(Seriously, has anyone talked about nothing else all week? Apart from World Book Day, of course).

Snow days are a tightly packed ball of your own childhood nostalgia mixed in with the joy that your children will get to experience that, the heady freedom of no school runs as well as a frosting of mild panic about when you’re going to do all your work.

This week saw our first official one because a) it never really snows down here and b) everyone who goes to the school lives within breathing distance of it, so it’s hard to justify closing it.

So here are five cold, hard truths about parenting on snow days:

One: You have all the snow-appropriate clothes for the children – snowsuits, the waterproof outfits you diligently bought for first-year Forest School, welly socks and so on. But where are they?!

Two: No matter how many millions of pairs of children’s gloves you’ve bought in your mum-lifetime, they will all go missing the minute the first flake of snow hits the floor. WHERE DO THEY GO? After a lot of looking, we managed to find four completely odd gloves, a miss-matched mix of mittens, fingerless and full-fingered affairs*. Clearly, there’s an odd glove graveyard somewhere, along with all the odd socks, hair clips and sunhats in the summer.

Three: Someone will always need a wee the minute you finish zipping up the final zip on the snowsuit. Just before you’re finally ready to leave the house. Despite you having asked several times *before* everyone got dressed.

Four: Sledging! Snowball fights! Making snow angels! It’s all fun and games…until someone cries, usually from a sledge ‘incident’, snow in the welly, not being so keen to take turns, the cold (that’ll be me, then).

Five: The great outdoors and life-affirming, breath-taking brightness of the snow and watching children play in it is GREAT, and all, but nothing beats coming home, whacking the heating on and letting everyone snuggle up and thaw out in front of CBeebies.

(*Update: Alex managed to buy not one but two multi-packs of gloves today. Shall we take bets on how long before they all go missing?)

More posts…five things we’ve read, watched and liked lately and how to deal with coat-refusing children, a handy guide – and follow me on Instagram