YO MAMA: How to build a snowman with a toddler
OPINION
All I wanted was to build a nice snowman.
It was the perfect day for it. The snow was fresh and tacky. The sun was shining and there was a beautiful, brisk bite to the air. I took a deep breath in, wanting to inhale the essence of this memorable day upon which my son would build his first snowman.
I glanced back at him from my reverie. He was standing motionless a few meters behind me, absentmindedly chewing on the chin strap of his toque.
“Wanna help me roll a snowball?” I called.
He looked my way but didn’t move. To be fair, he was fairly immobilized by his snowsuit.
“It’s gonna be fun!” I insisted, with elfish glee.
He gnawed on the chin strap like a cowboy chewing on a piece of straw. It was a standoff.
“OK,” I said. “I’ll get started and you can join me.”
I began forming the first snowball. It had been a long time since I’d made one and I had trouble rolling it into an even ball. It kept coming out lumpy and squat. I rolled it over to the kid and said “look! A snowball!”
He eyed it up and down, waddled over, and sat on it. Everything was a chair to him.
“Ok, yeah, or a snow throne!”
I rolled a new base snowball, followed by a second, smaller ball, while the kid watched from his snow-throne. Hoisting the second ball onto the first caught his interest. In the schema of his brain, this was like a new version of stacking blocks. He slid off his chair and toddled over to the half-made snowman.
“What do you think? Do you like ——,” I stopped mid-sentence as my son pushed the snowman over, giggling like a maniac.
The best part of stacking blocks? Knocking them down.
I put the body back on and added the head. The kid peered at the snowman from under the sagging brim of his toque. I didn’t trust him alone with Frosty.
“Now, we need some sticks. Can you help me find some sticks?” I said.
Off we went. The kid loved collecting bits of nature — my pockets were usually full of various rocks and twigs that he presented to me on walks. With the concentration of a chess grandmaster, he selected two sticks. One was roughly the length of a ruler. The second was a full on branch with gnarly bits like tentacles sticking out of it. When I asked the kid where I should put them, he pointed to Frosty’s left shoulder and lower abdomen.
This was not going to be a nice-looking snowman.
As we stood back to look at the contorted creation, I could tell the kid was catching on. He had that shy little smile he gets around strangers. In his mind, the sculpture was now detectable as a vaguely humanoid-shaped thing.
“Eyes!” I said. “We need eyes and a mouth. And I have something very special for the nose.”
One pinecone and a pebble formed the eyes, while a three-inch-long stick added a neutral and unenthused expression to the face — kind of like a snarky emoji. Meanwhile, the carrot I’d brought in my back pocket was gone. I looked around and caught sight of our 100 lb. great Pyrenees lab chewing on it. Oh well, I thought, snatching the nibbled nose and jamming it onto the snowman. At least it suited the overall aesthetic.
There, on my front lawn, sat the ugliest snowman you have ever seen. With its mangled arms and toddler-Picasso face, the lone snowman brought an eerie vibe to the yard. You know how clowns can creep people out? Snowmen can too.
It really was a very, very ugly snowman. But my son absolutely loved it. He giggled and waved at it triumphantly, as if it was real. And that was all the Christmas magic I needed.
— Charlotte Helston gave birth to her first child, a rambunctious little boy, in the spring of 2021. Yo Mama is her weekly reflection on the wild, exhilarating, beautiful, messy, awe-inspiring journey of parenthood.
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