Fun in the Snow

Although our human guardians, Polar and Grizzly, think snow is a nuisance, we bears have been looking forward to some settling ever since the first showers started.

'It's snowing!' one of us would say and we would all gather by the window to see how much fell.  By bedtime, there would be a lovely white blanket over the plants in the front garden but, in the morning, when we jumped out of our bear basket to see if we could go out and play, it would either have melted or turned to nasty, slippery ice.  

'I'll never get to play in the snow at this rate!' little Endon complained.  After hearing about our adventures last year, he was very keen to make a snow bear and try out the toboggan.

Finally, last week, we had enough to enjoy.  We put our warm jumpers and little felt duffle coats on and Polar lifted our toboggan down from the shelf where she had kept it for us all year.

'Enjoy yourselves this morning,' she said.  'I'll have to clear the drive ready to get the car out for work later on today, but you can play for now.'

'Yay!' we cheered.  We went into the back garden first and jumped down the steps to where there was snow on the path.  Endon sniffed it suspiciously, then stepped forward and put one of his back paws into it.

'It's cold!' he said.

'We told you it was,' said Hanley Bear.  'But you can slide on it, make patterns in it and build things out of it.  We'll show you!'

We ran down the path, pointing out the bird footprints and keeping a careful look out, as there were cat prints too.  Endon got very nervous about that.

'If anyone sees a cat, we must all stick together and growl to scare it away!' I told the smaller bears.  

But there was no sign of the cat, so we set to work scraping up a pile of snow and shaping it into a snowbear.  It wasn't as good as the one we made last year, as there wasn't as much snow, but Endon was pleased with it.

'Let's race the toboggan now!' cried Hanley.  Endon and I agreed, so we ran back to the house and got Grizzly to let us out into the front garden, as the best place to toboggan is the driveway. 

We put Endon right at the front, Hanley behind him and there was just enough room for me to jump on at the back after pushing to start it moving.

'Wheeeeee!' Endon cheered as we hurtled down the drive.  'That's brilliant!'

We pushed the toboggan back to the top of the drive and raced down again and again.  We hid when we saw the postman coming, as we didn't know if he liked small bears, especially small bears making the driveway all slippery!

The next time we came down the drive, there was a big footprint in our way.  It was Polar's and she had the snow shovel.

'I was worried about the postman,' she said.  'I'm going to clear this side now but you can still race on the other side.'

'We're starting to get a bit cold,' I admitted.  'We think we might like to pack up for today and have a nice cup of chocolate and some mini stroopwafels'. 

'That's very sensible, little bears,' she said, picking us and our toboggan up and carrying us into the kitchen.  'You don't want to get frozen.'

We warmed up with our hot drink and, although we thought about going out for another toboggan ride, we decided to stay indoors.  

Now the snow has melted again but we can still have fun in the garden, looking at the pretty winter flowers, running up and down the path and climbing the shrubs, so we are very happy little bears.