"Look mom, it's snowing!"

It's still winter, yes, and there is just a wee bit of snow this morning, but hardly any accumulation (read: definitely not enough to play in).

Before that, we had our own miniature version indoors (photos show the parts of the house with the least amount of snowfall):



So, one child saw it as that -- "Look mom, it's snowing!". And the other thought of it as the "secret ingredient" for their make-believe "Who's cuisine will reign supreme?" Iron Chef food challenge!

Now these are the things as a mom or dad, you want to rate the kids high on originality. Forty-five minutes after you've got down on all fours, though, and you've mobilized everything from the not-so-trusty handheld vacuum cleaner to the no-longer-amused husband, besides still trying to pick up and pick out the teeny specks with your fingers, you don't know whether to laugh or to cry!

Don't underestimate those white bits -- they break up into a million and one pieces, and are so feathery light, the ones that don't stick to anything and everything, have a way of floating themselves into nooks and crannies, and the deepest of the deep fluffs in the rugs! So much so that trundling over them with a vacuum cleaner, or getting the nozzle to do the job, just doesn't work.

You have to take my word for it, even if your child's old enough not to put anything this small into his or her mouth, it's not something you want to offer freely to him or her to play with. This isn't the first major cleanup of this sort for us (I know, I know, every time I said no more of it, but somehow it had a way of cropping up). And even finely shredded paper, tiny balls of foil, crushed pasta, and whatever else our boys lay their hands on for "masak-masak" and seldom fail to convert into miniscule proportions (!), don't come close. But oh, give me the real thing, anytime!