Skiing with Kolby

So, the week after Christmas was pretty crazy at the Bradshaw house. Isaac, Courtland, Eli, and I each had about a 12 hour stomach bug, which also meant we were having to do lots of laundry (one thing that will be really nice is when the little boys all get old enough to make it to the bathroom on time when they are sick), then Isaac and Courtland had pink eye, then Michael just felt awful for several days until he went in and got diagnosed with strep throat (I don’t know why, but this happened last year – the boys got RSV and two of them got ear infections, and Michael came down with step at the same time – something in Michael’s body must think that whenever the family gets sick he needs to have strep throat). Anyways, our big plans to celebrate our 7th anniversary were all messed up. We had splurged and gotten tickets months in advance through a special discount scout ski night at church to go night skiing together, and then the next night we were going to go to dinner and a movie – we had babysitters set up for months, and we were so excited. So it was very disappointing when we realized we just couldn’t go. Michael came home from work early the day that we were supposed to go skiing and wrapped up in a down blanket and just lay next to the space heater, then went to bed for hours. I cancelled the babysitters and sent an e-mail out to the people from church offering our ski tickets to anyone who could use them, since it was too late to get our money back. No one could use the tickets on such short notice, but we did get a call from Kolby’s primary class teacher offering to come stay with the younger boys while Michael slept upstairs if I wanted to take Kolby skiing, so as to at least not loose the money we had already spent on the tickets. What a nice offer!

So, after a whirlwind hour of running around the house and gathering up all the ski clothing for Kolby and I to use, and attempting to charge our old Kodak camera that we hadn’t used in years (because I wasn’t about to take our Canon camera skiing, but I still wanted to try to get some photos of Kolby), and getting the directions to Bristol Mountain (which happens to only be about 30 to 40 minutes south of our house, I found out), we were ready to go. We took Aria, the teenage daughter of Kolby’s teacher who came to babysit with us so she could ski too.

We had a fun time – Kolby enjoyed the bunny hill. And I thought the “people mover” (kind of like an escalator on the snow) was cool – and way easier to use than a rope tow. But after just a couple runs down the bunny hill Kolby was asking when we could go on the lift. We went down the bunny hill about 4 or 5 times, with me skiing behind him and holding onto his scarf that I had wrapped around his chest under his arms to help him stay up. Then we headed to a green run, but it was pretty cold going up the lift – I don’t know how cold it was on the hill that night, but our car said it was 10 degrees out when we arrived in the parking lot that afternoon – it was windy, and felt really cold (especially since in my hurry to get everything ready I forgot to take my long underwear pants). We got about half way down the run, and Kolby just froze – he started balling and I just held him up and skied all the way down to the lodge (but he didn’t fall down the entire way down, which is pretty good, especially for how fast we were trying to get down the hill). He was pretty upset, and we finally went into the bathroom and ran warm water over his hands until he got the feeling back in them. Luckily it was just his hands, he said his feet weren’t even cold (even though my toes took a while to thaw out). We decided to take a break and Kolby was quite happy after warming up with a Cup-o-Noodle soup. We ran into some friends from church to sit with, and talked with them a bit. Kolby said that he had a lot of fun skiing (which is pretty good, considering the last part of his last run), but he was done for the day. He stayed with our friends while I took a run down one of the black diamonds (which was really more like an easy blue run from any of the other ski resorts I’ve been to). It was fun, but skiing alone isn’t all that great, plus it was just so cold out there, so I came in and held Kolby until he went to sleep on my lap, and we just sat with our friends until Aria was ready to go home. Although not the anniversary celebration that had been planned, t was a fun night with Kolby.

Unfortunately, that little camera didn’t have a chance to charge all the way before we left, so when we got home we found that it had only taken one photo of Kolby – before we even got out on the hill – and the other photos that we took together on the bunny hill didn’t work. Oh well.

And Kolby was pretty excited to tell me after he went back to school this week that they talked in class about what the kids did over the vacation, and Kolby was the only one who went skiing (and one other boy went snowboarding). So I’m glad that he had a fun time.