El Hombre de Nieve

Albuquerque's had two snowfalls recently (weird I know!) and so we took advantage of one of them to go play. The park by my parents had snow and plenty of room to roam. Since Joaquin is an expert trained by watching 'Max & Ruby' (does this blog get repetative or what?), we made a snowman by carefully rolling balls of snow. As a former adherent of the clump method for making snowmen, I was impressed that it actually worked. We found sticks, bark and a pine cone to make the features for our snowman. (It had to be a pine cone for the nose, Joaquin was very insistent.) As cute as he looked, I was getting quite attached to him, but Joaquin had other plans. Recently he's been a fan of melting ice. Apparently Grandpa or Grandma showed him that if you drop ice in the sink and then pour water on it, it melts! He'll even tell you how it melts faster if you pour hot water on it. He loves to repeat this 'experiment' at their house. Since the park has a shallow arroyo that was flowing with snowmelt, we made another version of the experiment by throwing snowballs in and watching them melt. Joaquin loved it and was soon entraced by the idea that larger snowballs took longer to melt. He ran back to our snowman and decapitated him, carrying the head back to throw in the arroyo. This was so much fun that he repeated the process with his torso. Daniel and I thought it seemed a little murderous, but what do we know? Still, large as they were, those snowballs did melt eventually. (Especially since they lost most of their mass in the retrieval process. Joaquin would just pick up the biggest piece and keep coming.) So he and Daddy hatched an idea. They rolled the bottom of our snowman towards the arroyo, actually increasing it's size considerably on it's way to destruction. After pushing it in, we admired it's beautiful modern art-esque qualities and, getting bored with it's seeming indestructibility, went home for cocoa.