For Christmas, we gave the kids 3 lessons each at Stevens for snowboarding.
It’s not an easy snow sport to pick up—I have fond memories because when Dwayne and I began dating, I had already tried boarding and he dived in and bought a board before his first shredding attempt, and we learned together, often while nibbling on, “yum, skier sandwich”.
Anyway, the theory goes that it takes at least 3 [painful] days before boarding is fun. After 3 lessons, we have 1 kid who loves it 
(Hint, it’s this one)
and 2 who went from “yeah, this is okay!” to “WAAAHH, I HATE THIS! TAKE ME HOME RIGHT THIS MINUTE! I’M GOING TO BURN MY LONG UNDERWEAR AND SYMBOLICALLY ERASE ALL TRACE OF THE HORRENDOUS ‘SPORT’ ONCE AND FOR ALL!” In about 15 minutes.
I will admit that they did about one 3-hour lesson a month, so it wasn’t an ideal schedule. Our last day was also a bit of a cluster when we parked in the lot and realized that Wesley did not actually bring his jacket. The Wombat got really pissy when she had to give her jacket to Wesley, wear Kyla’s jacket, who in turn wore my jacket, and Mama got to wear Dwayne’s extra sweatshirt over my own sweatshirt. (Really, she was pissy?) [For those wanting to second guess the parenting choice, letting him go without a jacket was not an option. You can’t place other people in the position of causing your child hypothermia because you want him to suffer. Also, wasting the last lesson so one parent could sit with him in the lodge for 4 hours while the other parent shredded alone wasn’t really appealing either.]
Anyway, the kids had lift tickets and their rentals for another hour after lessons, so we took them up Daisy for their first bunny hill. Piper came down well the first time, raced down the second time, and waited and waited and waited for a parent to take her up again. Meanwhile, Dwayne and I were juggling a Kyla and Wesley who wanted to go down the hill…until they both had their first fall. I don’t think the wailing started until the second fall, but unfortunately, they had about 100 more falls to go before the bottom. Eventually, Wesley took off the board and just stomped down the mountain like an injured and furiously wild cat. Kyla was at least as dramatic.
All I know is that by the time we turned the equipment and got their own boots on, we had three sweating, weeping, angry children…Piper because she couldn’t go down the hill again because of her siblings.
I reached a new funny in parenting that afternoon. By the time we made it back to the car, they were lashing out at each other and were starting to recycle the earlier fight over the coats. So I said in my sternest voice, “Everyone stop talking. Get in the car and start eating cookies. Eat lots of cookies NOW.” And then turned away to try not to laugh aloud.
Kids eating cookies cannot cry or yell. I’m definitely packing boxes and boxes next time…if we ever try this again!
These pictures are just for the kids so they can see how cool they looked back when they learned at age 7, 9, and 10.
