Snow Sports

I woke up last Saturday and declared, “We are doing snow sports today! Who’s with me?” I turned to Diana, whose Strep Throat had turned her a delightful shade of gray. She was out.

Luca was covered in whatever breakfast used to be. By the look of it, a freshly killed turtle. He was probably in but it would’ve taken all day to clean him off.

That left Elijah. I found him sitting where he always is, at the computer. “Eli, let’s go outside and do snow sports!” He grabbed the computer with a death grip and moaned, “Nooooooo!”

Too bad. I was stronger than him. After wrestling him into his coat and snow pants, we drove over to my Denver friend Tom’s house with the explicit desire to do some hardcore sledding. I wanted to grab air and do 360s or whatever they do on the X-Games. And if you are going to do anything that involves potentially breaking a collarbone, Tom is your man. The man attacks walking to the restroom with more intensity than most religious cultists.

As Tom loaded sleds into his car, his son and my son made snow angles. “Stop that,” I said, “You need to get mentally prepared to shred and stuff!” They ignored me and swooped their arms and legs in little angle wing shapes.

Tom showed me a spray can of grease he intended to use on the sleds for maximum speed. Now we were cooking. I imagined us having to fetch our sons from tree limbs after particularly great sledding jumps.

We piled into the car and drove three point five minutes to the hill. Well, technically it wasn’t a hill. It was more of a gentle slope. Well, technically it wasn’t a gentle slope. It was an area where one side was slightly higher elevation than the other. By about 2 degrees.

Tom understood something that I clearly didn’t. We were sledding with 3 and 4 year olds. Not dudes from a Mountain Dew commercial. In fact, it was the perfect hill for them. They were able to get down the hill with some modicum of speed. And if they fell (which they did frequently), there were no tears. The only potential issue was if they got going really fast they ran the risk of nudging the fence that encircled the baseball diamond we were technically sledding on.

In fact, the only two injuries were inflicted on Tom and myself when we tried to sled standing up a la snowboards. Tom racked himself. And I dislocated my brain.