After 12 inches of snow fell in Overland Park, Kansas, three high school seniors built a snowman over 13 foot tall in their front yard.

In the past week, we have had two heavy snows with at least 12 inches from each. Earlier, my dad dared me as a joke to build a snowman larger than 12 feet tall, which was the tallest snowman built in Kansas from the first snowfall.

When I told my friend Lucy about my plan to actually build a 13 ft snowman, she thought it was a fantastic idea (part of the reason being that her US History assignment over the snowdays was to build a famous American snowman; thus before this picture the snowman had a top hat and beard on in order to look like a rather Frankenstein President Lincoln). So yesterday Maddye, Lucy, and I (with help from my younger sister Domino Colyer) spent roughly four hours building "FrankenLincoln."

We built the snowman by shoveling snow into two buckets, and stacking them similar to building a sandcastle. After we reached 8 feet tall we began to have problems reaching up high enough, to place the buckets and thus we had to build stepping stone stairs around the snowman, which you see us sitting on top of. Two of us would be filling buckets while one would be on top dumping them or catching snow chunks we tossed up to fill in the cracks. More than once you'd see a girl slide down a 10 foot mountain of snow or get a have a mini avalanche in their face.In the end we placed tennis balls as eyes and a scarf to make our rather towerish snowman actually look more like a person.

I have to say reaction wise, it was all a sense of proud accomplishment, because deep down, none of us actually believed we would reach the 13 foot marker. (In fact, Maddye laughed at me for a good five minutes when I first told her our plan.) It was really cool too because as we were building you'd see cars randomly drive through our cul de sac to take a picture. Like Lucy Hodel said," If someone were to ask me right now what the proudest moment in my life was, I would probably say building this snowman."