How Building An Igloo In My Backyard Was The Best Snow Day Ever

For Adam Crawford and his son, more important than the things they created, was that they created things together. (But the things they created were pretty great too!)

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It was a Wednesday evening, and I had just gotten the call that my son would be out of school due to impending weather. He was pumped and so was I because work was also called off for me.

I woke up early and shoveled my wife’s half of the driveway at about seven AM.

This is not something I’m accustomed to doing in Tennessee. But when I dug my shovel into the eight inches of snow I had an idea that made me smile:

I’d never built an igloo before which meant that my son had never built an igloo. In fact, my son had never built a snowman either. This was going to be an awesome snow day.

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With our usual Saturday morning ritual of Spongebob Squarepants and cereal out of the way (but awesomely occurring on a Thursday), I bundled my son up in two layers of pants and three shirts, pulled his sock hat on tight, and into the fray of our backyard we went:

“Are we going to build a snowman? (enter undying Frozen song here),” he asked.

“Yes, we are, but first, we’re building an igloo,” I responded.

His eyes lit up, and he smiled from one side of his sock hat to the other.

The Work Began

Having never built one of these, I sorely underestimated the work involved. We started by piling up snow in the biggest pile we could manage. I did the heavy lifting by moving shovel loads of snow from one area of the yard to another and my son patted his miniature hands all over the pile packing the snow as we went (with a little help from the back of a snow shovel at the hands of his dad).

Within about a half hour we had a pile about three feet high. “What do we do now?” He asked.

“We dig into the pile.” I said.

He looked confused, so I just went to work.

I began to burrow into the pile taking each shovel of snow from the inside and piling it back on top. Within a few short minutes, we had a doorway and a hole big enough that I could crawl into and start shaping the inside.

After initially punching two holes in the side of the igloo, because of somewhat overly aggressive interior decorating on both our parts, we patched it up. It looked great. The inside was big enough that both of us could crawl into the door and sit next to each other.

So we did.

“What do we do next?,” he asked again.

“We cut a hole in the top.” I said.

“Why would we cut a hole in the top?”

“So that we can sit in it and not worry about it collapsing in on us,” I responded confidently.

“Oh.” It was his first realization that it could actually fall in on us.

We cut the hole in the top and then rubbed our hands all over the outside to smooth it out and make it look nice.

Breaking It Down: The Father-Son Chat

“Can we get in there now?,” he asked.

“We sure can.”

We crawled in the igloo and sat down next to each other for a minute. “This is cool, dad,” he said, a smile on his face.

“It is pretty cool isn’t it? Did you know that people actually lived in things like this?”

“That would be really cold!” he said.

“I agree. I’m glad we don’t live in one of these.”

“We should build a snow man to live in it,” said my son.

“I agree.”

And that’s how our igloo came to have a butler.

All in all we spent about four hours in the backyard shaping snow into things. We built a snow dwelling and a snow person to live in the snow dwelling.

But more important than the things we created, we created things together.

And of all the snow days I’ve had in my life, this was by far the best.

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Photo Credit: Author