AIM Loitering

::::taps foot::::

:::whistles a piece of musak heard earlier in the day::::

:::looks around the Internet a bit:::

Chris is out of town on business tonight and I'm just waiting for him to log on so I can tell him all about our afternoon at the ski lodge. But I think he might be having a bunch of fun with my cousins tonight, so I reckon I'll just write it all down here.

Ben and Milo spent an hour learning about skiing this afternoon. I was a chaperone, for which I earned one lift ticket and one rental. I had intended to sort of keep an eye on their lesson and then ski around Little Bear learning slope with them. However, Max saw me skiing around and even though he was skiing with one of his best friends, he wanted to ski with me, too. Since I don't know how much longer the boy might pick sitting with me on the ski lift over sitting with his friends, I didn't say no. After we went down Little Bear twice, he was ready for Deer Run.

Now, technically, Deer Run is just my speed. BUT. The weather has been all over the map lately and what we had on the hill today was a thin layer of snow topped with a thin layer of ice. In a few places it was bare hill and in a few other places it was plain ice. AND I'm totally out of shape. Totally. I haven't been on a treadmill in a year. I sit at my computer all day and I type. So I didn't really have the thighs a girl needs to keep up the kind of control you want to have when you're skiing on a steep icy hill.

I just plain couldn't keep up!

Max was soooo sweet. Trying to be so encouraging and saying "You can do it!" and "It gets better here soon!" As much as my legs were SCREAMING and I honestly wondered if I was going to lose all control in a few spots (and I was a good 20 minutes longer than Max and Brian getting down that hill. I really had to stop here and there and just stand there until my legs stopped screaming.) I still had my sense of humor about the situation--and the understanding that this was a wake-up call for me. At the bottom of the hill Max asked if I would go up again with him and I declined, knowing full well my only hope to get down that hill one more time would be scooching the whole way on my tush. I said honestly that I just was too out of shape and I'd need to get a little exercise before I could try that again and Max said honestly that he hoped I would because he really wanted to go down Deer Run with me again before the end of the season.

Hmmm . . . get back on treadmill or poke out eye with hot iron poker? Sheesh. Tough call. I came home and had a slice of pumpkin pie to think about it. (What?) Of course I'll get on the treadmill. I don't know if I can make enough progress to ski down Deer Run with Max before the end of the ski season here (it's not like we're in the Sierras . . .), but it gives me something to shoot for.

:::Sigh:::

Eeeenyway. I limped over to the area where Ben and Milo were still having their lesson, and they were just starting to do the thing where the little guy skis like ten feet and tries to snow plow and instead plows into the instructor (which Ben and Milo thought was great fun, but nearly knocked over the tiny petite ski instructor--we need one of the big guys for Ben and Milo. Their instructor should at least be twice the weight/height of the 6-yr-olds). So they didn't even make it down the hill yet.

Here's the thing. I totally can't take them down that hill by myself. a) there are two of them and they can't stop yet except by falling down and in general, I think falling down ALL the freakin' time when you're trying to learn to ski is maybe more discouraging than most of us remember. b) I can't ski backwards, much less snow plow backwards, and even if I could, I sure couldn't after shredding my thigh muscles on that glacial excuse for an easy ski slope.

I was a little bummed because it was clear to me that Ben and especially Milo both wanted to do more skiing and had more get-up-and-go left and I just DIDN'T. So hopefully next week the instructor will actually get them down the hill and I can maybe ski a little with them after the lesson.

One good thing--I managed to get Milo's socks fixed ten minutes before we left the house, so both boys had warm wool handknit knee-high socks to wear with their boots and even though MY feet were totally numb and frozen (I was wearing double layers of cotton socks, because I haven't finished a pair of wool socks for me yet), they were just hunky dory. Which is good, because numb, frozen feet (or really any other body part) will also make you hate skiing. And I want my kids to like skiing.

Which, bottom line, is what all my kids were feeling by the end of the day. Max actually RUSHED through his dinner to get out in time to get two more runs down the hill before we had to leave (it was dark, the full moon high in the ski, but skiing under the lights is pretty cool).

One of the other Moms who is always there through the whole thing is also the mom to one of Ben and Milo's kindergarten classmates. So for the last hour while we waited for the Max to finish skiing, the twinks ran around with T and her little sister, M. They made noise and were a disturbance, so I was glad when 7pm arrived and so did my son and one of his classmates. (We were giving him a ride home.)

So here we are back home. I have to find a way to stay awake because I really need to get some serious workwork done tonight. But I'm going to toss the littles into a hot bathtub and put them to bed early so they can dream big dreams of shushing down gentle slopes.