Not All Mountain Kids Want to Ski Every Day
For us, Presidents Day weekend began early, on Friday morning, while all the other kids were still in school. Ha ha to them! Unfortunately, the joke turned on Thumper, whose friends, his lifeline, were all bailing on skiing. He plunged into a deep funk. Not wanting to hang out with his little brother, who had gotten the “no brothers allowed” rule spelled out the night before, he stayed home and slunk into the Xbox.
There was nothing I could do to get him and Hootie-Hoo out of the house. Rumor has it, from all the other exceptional parents out there doing it right, that skiing with your kids is “SO MUCH FUN,” but with Hootie-Hoo and me it’s often hit or miss. You see, he is my father, Harold, reincarnated, and unless we bring friends along, I’m often setting myself up to be yelled at. It’s called on-snow parent abuse. Thankfully, I know when I’m not up to the endurance required to stay tolerant and humorous with kids. I didn’t push the ski thing that day.
If skiing was out, I had to find a way to bring the funk out of the boy, who at the moment is very confused by parents who seem to be ignoring the child they’re trying to stay in tune with, absorbed instead in the workbooks assigned by our valley’s amazing certified parenting instructor, Charla Belinski.
It’s true: our house is in lockdown parent-training mode for teenage discipline. Thumper loves to joke about us: “If they get a call from my teacher for making a fart noise in class, they sit me down when I get home and say, ‘So what punishment do YOU think we should give you?’”
Why hasn’t anybody written the book that tells us what we’re getting into BEFORE we have kids? It could be titled Sink or Swim, or Parenting: It’s Not a Leap of Faith, or Kids Rule, Parents Don’t Have a Clue. Come on, help me here, the creative outlet is wide open.
After exhausting my list of “let’s have fun” ideas, from playing cards to building forts, I took the boys to see Escape from Planet Earth, a sweet, somewhat dull story about cute aliens. That’s what I love about Brevitt: for all his super-dude freestyling coolness, he’s still very loving and will come to a PG movie with his eight-year-old brother and his dear old mum.
It was a nice distraction, and when we emerged into the sunshine of a beautiful day, Hootie-Hoo and I were relieved when Thumper got the phone call: a friend wanted him to come over. He could now begin his triple sleepover.
Later in the day, after I picked up Axel and five of his friends from skiing, they excitedly relayed the news: their favorite ski coach had gotten engaged to a beautiful woman from Argentina.
“Her sister’s beautiful too,” the posse of eleven-year-olds went on. Then my sweet little Axel, with long, black, silky eyelashes and an inner sense of self that will always keep the girls on their toes, said he was going to try harder in Spanish so that when he grew up (and was released from his mother’s coddling grip) he could travel the world and meet beautiful Latina women on the beach. I told him he’d better stay cool and not ogle when he got there, because women don’t like that kind of thing. He and his friends came up with a plan. Only where Axel’s ideas had some semblance of cool, his friends’ ideas came straight out of Dumb and Dumber.
Axel: I could have my friend trip me so I land next to her towel.
Friend: Yeah, we could trip the girl and see if she’s OK.
Axel: We could bury our younger brothers in the sand, and they could reach out and trip us onto the towel.
Friend: Yeah, we could kick sand in our brothers’ faces and make them cry, and the girls will feel sorry for them and come over.
And so the conversation went for the next thirty minutes until we got home.
Boys… Baddy and I need to check into a parenting hotel or wrap our boys in cellophane… or something!
