What happened to the snow?

This is a question Pumpkin asks me frequently. We live in the Maritimes and are only a 15 minute walk from the ocean. Actually, if you walk to the top of my street, you can see the ocean. So this is the typical weather pattern of winter here: Rain + mild Rain + mild Rain + mild Windy + COLD Snow + cold Snow + mild Rain + mild Rain + mild Rain + mild Windy + COLD So as you can see, it does snow, but then it gets warm and rains, then freezes, then the process starts all over again. I now also understand why the Inuit have over 26 names for snow. The last snow fall dropped perfect wet packing snow. So the next day we tried to make a snow man but the temperature was dropping and freezing the packing snow, so it was a bit of a challenge. However, we did manage to kind of get one up. It was more like a snow blob than a man. It was a mound for a body and a head on top. Rocks for the face and the kids put as many sticks as they could find in the snow man. It looking more like some kind of alien snow blob with a dozen arms protruding from obscure places. They were proud of it, and I tried not to laugh. I didn't get a chance to take a picture and you guessed it....it rained and rained last night, so now the poor thing has melted quite a bit and looks like a snow pile with sticks sticking out of it. However, there is good news. I build the kids little snow fort inthe back yard and that seems to be holding up!