Skiing

The twins turn six

/ davamarie / 1 Comment

I’m stunned at every birthday. It all just races by.

For last year’s birthday we planned to take them up north for a long weekend away, including a stay at an indoor water park that they love, but we scheduled it several weeks out from their birthday and by the time the date arrived we were already in lockdown and had to cancel. They haven’t forgotten and still ask when we’ll finally be able to fulfil that promise, so for their birthday this year we really wanted to be able to do something special. I told them weeks earlier that we could take them skiing for the first time if they wanted to, and they were thrilled. Vivienne in particular has felt a certain injustice every time I leave to ski with only Jonah. But as the week approached the weather was warm and the snow was melting and sloppy and things began to look uncertain. We scrambled to find something different at the last minute, thinking that horseback riding might be an excellent alternative. The Saturday morning before their birthday though, we decided to stick with the plan to ski, 45 degrees or not.

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Five things right now

/ davamarie / 4 Comments

The other day my sister sent me a belated birthday gift, a book called Moon Lists: Questions and Rituals for Self-Reflection. It’s basically a thoughtfully guided journal, which seems like something that I would take to immediately. I love clear instructions, parameters, boundaries, frameworks; that’s where I thrive. It’s also just the right amount of woo-woo to match my sensibilities. But as I flipped through it I had some big feelings that made me feel like maybe it wasn’t for me. There was just enough ambiguity to leave me unsure of the “right” way to proceed (I know, I know, but it’s a thing for me). On top of that, the book provides examples for a variety of the pages/prompts, and the examples are painfully and intimidatingly highbrow. I’ll give you an example: Continue reading →

Snapshots from a ski trip

/ davamarie / 1 Comment

Last Friday Jonah had the day off from school while no one else did. A friend of ours told me recently that she’d taken her daughter, also in kindergarten, skiing for the first time. “She loved it!” she said of her daughter. “You have to take him!”

I grew up skiing and have so many happy memories of those times. My dad took me for the first time when I was seven or so, just he and I. While I don’t remember learning, I vaguely remember coming home and falling asleep on our brown velvet couch after a long day out in the snow. In the years that followed we went up north and to Colorado on ski trips as a family or with our next door neighbors who had girls the same age as my sister and I. I can picture moments like snapshots of the places we stayed, some nice and some less so, the various colors of chairlifts, runs that twisted through the woods and the places we would veer just off of the run to weave through the trees. In middle school my happiest memories are from ski club, winter weeknights when my mom would pack up and drop off all of my ski gear, always packing a Hershey’s Cookies and Mint candy bar in my bag. We’d stay after school until the bus took us way out to the ski hills where they would let us loose with the responsibility to return by 9:00 p.m. before the bus left to bring us back. It left me with a thrilling sense of maturity and trust. Continue reading →