“How many sleeps until we ski?”
These are the questions dreams are made of.
You and your brother have embraced the wonder of snow and joy of skiing. I couldn’t be happier.
We don’t get a lot of snow in the sea-level lowlands, maybe a few days a year at most. When I was your age, I dreamt of snow days in the neighborhood. I watched the evening news in the wintertime and let KOMO’s Steve Pool dangle out weather forecast promises about snow falls as thick as his mustache. More often than not, I’d wake up to a morning of disappoinment when snow never came or turned to rain faster than I could zip up a jacket. That just made the big snow days that much sweeter.
You are much further ahead in mountain and snow experiences. You’re skiing confidently at age 5, whereas I wasn’t there until age 25, finally giving into Uncle Scott’s insistance to get on skis the previous 15 years. You could say I made the decision far too late, and my skiing technique still suffers from that delayed learning. I can get down any hill, just not always pretty.
Your confidence clicked like bindings just last week you finally put together the “pizza and french fry” technique. A new direction I gave you to “push your heels out” to make a pizza was all you needed to go from holding onto me and your Mom to get down a hill to jumping out ahead of us off a chairlift with famous last words: “Try to catch me.”
You accelerated so much that I graduated you from the Discovery bunny hill chair at Crystal Mountain up to the Chinook base chair that gets you mid-mountain. Mom wasn’t looking when we did this, of course. She wouldn’t have objected but had her hands full with Matteo who was mid-tantrum, mid-run back on Discovery.
That was a special experience getting you on those “bigger runs.” I skied you down the steeper parts of Tinkerbell, a green run, and let you ski the rest of the way. No falls, just big smiles and big pizzas. You crushed it! We celebrated the achievement with Cup O’Noodle in the parking lot and told Mom about the big adventure. You’ll have so many more to come.
Love, Dad