Freezing Rain!

So in January we had some pretty crazy weather one day... Have you ever heard of "FREEZING RAIN!?"  Me neither until this January.  Freezing rain is when a warm pocket of air gets trapped above a cold pocket of air, so then when it rains, the water immediently FREEZES on everything it hits, creating SHEETS of ice all over EVERYTHING!  Cars looked like a waterfall had fallen on them & then frozen, and the sidewalks & roads were all covered with a thick sheet of ice, making VERY dangerous driving conditions for everyone, but also a GREAT ice-skating-rink for us out on the driveway to play on!  :)

There was also a thin layer of ice frozen across the whole top of the snow already piled up in our yard, so Laron figured out that we could break-off big pieces of ice & throw them across the ice-field & watch them SHATTER into a hundred pieces as they slid down our pretend bowling lane... But it was hard to see the broken ice pieces on top of the snow, so Laron got the great idea to put drops of food coloring on the chunks of ice before we threw them & then we could see how far our ice really traveled before it shattered!  The kids LOVED this & since school was canceled for the day anyway, we stayed out there WAY too long, just playing around with the crazy ice.  It's kind-of hard to see, but in the next picture you can see some of our shattered pieces of ice, broken up across our icy backyard...  Our yard looked pretty colorful that day!!!

I'm glad Laron knows how to turn a crazy weather phenomenon into a day of fun memories!  But since Utah has only experienced "freezing rain" 9 times since 1940, its probably something that we won't be experiencing again any time soon... :)