[su_heading size=”18″]Not All Mountain Kids Want to Ski Everyday[/su_heading]

For us, President’s Day weekend began early, on Friday morning, when all the other kids were still in their school. Ha Ha to them! Unfortunately, the joke turned on Thumper whose friends, his lifeline, were all bagging out on him for skiing. He plunged into a deep depression. Not wanting to hang with his little brother, who had gotten the “no brothers allowed” rules spelled out  to him the night before, he stayed home and slunk into the X-Box.

There was nothing I could do to get he and Hootie-Hoo out of the house. Rumor has it, from all the other exceptional parents out there doing it right, that to ski with your kids is, “SO MUCH FUN”, but with Hootie-Hoo and I it is often hit or miss. You see, he is my father, Harold, reincarnated and unless we bring friends along to ski with us, I am often setting myself up to be yelled at. It’s called, on-snow parent abuse. Thankfully, I know when I am not up to the endurance specificities required to stay tolerant and humorous when it comes to kids. I didn’t push the ski thing that day.

If skiing was out, I had to discover a way to bring da funk outta da boy, who at the moment is very confused by his parents who seem to be ignoring the child that they are trying to stay in tune with, and are more absorbed in the child-help workbooks prescribed by our valley’s amazing certified parenting instructor, Charla Belinski.

It’s true, at the moment our house has gone into 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 yet to let us know what we are getting ourselves 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 for ya.

After exhausting my list of “let’s have fun” ideas, from playing cards to making forts, I took the boys to see the movie, Planet Earth, a sweet little, somewhat dull, story about cute aliens. That’s what I love about Brevitt, in all of his super dude freestyling coolness, he still is very loving and will come to a PG movie with his 8 year old brother and his dear ole mum.

It was a nice distraction, and when we emerged back into the sunshine of a beautiful day, Hootie-Hoo and I were relieved when Thumper received that phone call, a friend was wanting him to come over, he could now begin his triple sleepover.

Later in the day, after picking up Axel and five of his friends from skiing, they excitedly relayed the news of the day, their favorite ski coach had gotten engaged to a beautiful woman from Argentina.

“Her sister’s beautiful too,” the posse of eleven year old boys went on…and then my sweet little Axel, with long, black, silky eyelashes and an inner sense of self, that will always keep the girls hot on their toes, said that he was going to try harder in Spanish so that when he grew up (and is released from his mother’s coddling grip) he could travel around the world and meet the topless, beautiful Latino women. I told him that he better be careful to stay cool and not ogle when he gets there, for 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 coolness to them, his friends ideas became  like the movie, Dumb and Dumber.

Axel – I could have my friend trip me and I land next to her towel.

Friend – Yeah, we could trip the girl and see if she is okay.

Axel – We could bury our younger brothers in the sand, and they could reach out and trip us into the towel.

Friend – Yeah, we could kick sand in the faces of our brothers and make them cry and the girls will feel sorry for them and come over.

and thus the conversation went on for the next thirty minutes until we came home.

Boys…Baddy and I need to check into a parenting hotel or wrap our boys up in cellophane…or something!