You Know You're A Minnesota Parent When...

10. You can exercise right in your own driveway and love it because you don't have to drive all the way to the gym!
9. You kids beg and plead after preschool, "Can we ice skate on the driveway when we get home Mommy?"
8. You break your windshield scraper in the very first snowstorm - and the stores are all sold out of them when you try to replace it - so you end up using your gloves to wipe the snow off - and now you get to go around with wet gloves for the next three days until they dry or you have to use them as scrapers again.
7. You start to reason that all those pediatricians that tell you not to let your kids watch more than two hours of TV a day don't live in Minnesota. They must live in California or Alabama...or maybe they aren't parents.
6. Your husband can't let it go that one string of lights on the house isn't lighting up right. So he climbs up despite the ice and snow on the roof. Don't worry, he has life insurance.
5. You start cursing the people who laid the sidewalk for making parts of it jut up, making your shovel stop dead when you hit it and then the shovel handle impale itself upon some soft part of your body - like your stomach. And then it happens again. And again. And you just groan every time it happens...and keep on shoveling because you don't want the kids up the street to slip on the ice on their way to the bus stop.
4. You can entertain your children for hours by spinning wheelies in your cul-de-sac. Okay, so you can entertain yourself for hours too.
3. You can never understand how the newspapers can report the amount of snow that has fallen...there is eight inches in the driveway and one on the grass. Which do they measure it from? Why does it always have to blow onto the driveway? Can't it ever blow from the driveway onto the grass?
2. You have to start getting ready 30 minutes before you want to start getting ready to leave because that's how long it takes to find all the hats, gloves, scarves, coats, and boots your kids have spread across the house the last time the came inside. And then, it takes an extra fifteen minutes to get all that paraphernalia on after you have found it because no small child under age five can get their own boots or gloves on - at least at my house.
1. You have to go out and buy all new coats, hats, mittens, boots, scarves, shovels, and sleds every December because you have lost all the ones from last year, only have one of each set, they don't fit the kids anymore, they have broken, or your child declares it unusable because it used to be their brother's. So you make them go without until the stores stock back up because all the smart and well prepared parents went out and bought everything they needed in November. Or probably August.
0. You have to invent silly games like "How many E or M pushups can I do?" and "Lava Pillows" or my personal favorite, "Stair Jumping" (yes, those are my couch pillows, and yes, they are all now deformed thanks to my children's imaginative game), to pass the cold winter days when the kids can't go outside.