The weekend before last we decided to haul our coughing crew up to Leavenworth for two days of snow play. We booked a room at the Best Western and the kids immediately went gonzo over the charm of the ice machine and the joy of a pool that’s housed for the winter under a giant steamy tent. Already our mini vacation was a hit and we hadn’t even left the hotel!

Now, when I was a kid “playing in the snow” meant driving up a mountain in our camper and spending a few days hiking up ice-slick hillsides, then hurling ourselves down the mountain on an over-inflated inner tube or one of those maddening plastic disks that spins around like the teacup ride at Disneyland. When I was a small child, I enjoyed this very much – probably because my parents hauled the sled up the hill for me. But as I got older the inevitable crashes became more painful, the thought of the church youth group watching me climb up the mountain in padded snow pants became intimidating, and finally, my dad and I crashed the toboggan at “killer hill” in Lake Tahoe, requiring a trip to the ER and a leg brace (for my dad, that is. He ripped the tendons in his leg.) To top it all off, I fell down a granite hillside while hiking and developed a pretty resounding fear of heights. (Paul would like me to point out here that when you are inner tubing down the mountain you are actually only six inches off the ground, but I call it ‘heights’ because you are FLINGING YOURSELF DOWN THE SIDE OF A MOUNTAIN. )
All that to say that the whole “let’s take the kid’s sledding” thing was a parental obligation and not something I was wholeheartedly looking forward to.

When we got to the inner tubing hill I realized that times, they are a ‘changing. No only were the inner tubes decked out with slings so your but didn’t drag in the snow, but they also had handles to grip on to, and the best part of all…wait for it…was a rope tow that hauled you up the mountain while you sat back on your tube and chilled. Needless to say, I was considerably shored up by knowing that I wasn’t going to be hauling tubes up the hill for four hours, but I was still nervous about flying down the hill. The first run quickly dissolved this nervousness as it became apparent that the gentle slope had been carefully engineered to feel fast and scary, while in fact being perfect banked for safety and an easy slow down and dismount at the end.

So about my sixth time up the mountain, I’m kicking back in my inner tube as the rope tow is hauling me up the side of the hill and I’m thinking about what a great post this is going to be …all about the The Three-Martini Mama way of taking the kids sledding and how you can practically sip a hot toddy while you are enjoying the scenery and being pulled up the slope. I’m literally writing the post in my head when I hear the kids who run the rope tow say something like “I’m not really liking how this dismount slope is working.” No sooner are the words out of the kid’s mouth than my inner tube hits the edge of the slope, flips over and deposits me head-first onto the smooth concrete-hard surface of the ice bowl that is the end of the tow rope. My head makes a resounding crack and everything goes black, and then stars, and all I can think of is what a mother of a migraine I’m going to have. The rope tow kids, who are bored stiff with running the tow line on the kiddie hill, are STOKED to have an injury occur on their shift and are suggesting that they call Ski Patrol when I finally get my wits about them and beg them to put the radio down, because the last thing I want is to be hauled off the inner tube hill on a stretcher behind a snowmobile with my big yellow neck brace proclaiming ‘biggest dork in the world.”

I spent the rest of the day taking pictures of the kids going laughingly down the hill with their dad, while simultaneously popping Tylenol and doing gentle neck stretches to see if I could still move my head. (Answer: not so much.) When we got back to the hotel, I tried to book a massage, but it was the Interdenominational Christian Ladies Retreat (I kid you not) and needless to say the massage therapist was booked. Thankfully there was the hot tub, and lots of hot water in the shower, not to mention the teeniest tiniest gin and tonic followed by one or two demoral and maybe a shot of rum in my hot chocolate.

It’s only been a week and look! I can almost turn my head!

(I would like to take this time to apologize in advance to my children for having two of the most athletically inept parents in the world. When you’re dad’s claim to athletic fame is a year of squash during grad school and your mom gets injured on the sledding hill, you really shouldn’t bank on sports scholarships for college.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 9:51 am and is filed under Magpie Girl, Magpie Mama, Rachelle Mee-Chapman.
Tags: children, kids, parenting



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