I’ve been promising both Finn and Zachary we’d go snowboarding for two years now. Last year was a bust for a couple of different reasons, but I wanted to make good on it so they didn’t think I was a complete loser. I planned out a Tuesday night dropoff with Karean so we could hit the road early on Wednesday and be at the slopes by 10. In a rare display of foresight, I prebought the tickets online and downloaded rental forms so that they’d be pre-filled when we walked in to the shop.

Our drive up was uneventful, and we were in the parking lot by 10:10. At 10:30 we were sitting on benches in the rental barn putting on boots and zipping up snowpants. They issued us boards and we walked out to the bunny slope to wait for our instructor, an amiable fellow whose name I forgot, who ended every sentence with “Word.” Nobody else was there, so we had Word all to ourselves, and he took us up the Magic Carpet to the halfway point on the bunny slope and he showed the kids the basics. Finn has been through this twice but still hadn’t mastered stopping without falling, so we worked on that while Word helped Zachary get his basics down.

We moseyed to the bottom of the hill and then climbed on the chair lift to the top of the bunny slope, and wade our way down from the top again. I let Word work with Zachary while I tried to get Finn to stay upright, and she began to get real frustrated. At the point where our patience for each other was running out, Word and I switched and I asked him to help her with stopping. By the time we all made it down the mountain, she was stopping in complete control and Zachary was in control of his board.

We agreed to stop and get some lunch, so we thanked Word and headed into the lodge. After they downed a pizza and a burger they were ready to hit the hill again. We used the magic carpet for the rest of the day (I didn’t want to leave one of them to ride the chair lift alone) and Finn did three runs on her own without falling down once, practicing her stopping on her heel edge. I helped Zachary with his control and we worked on braking as well.

Finley, whose outright fear of the Magic Carpet kept us from riding it the entire second half of our last trip, was so confident in herself that she rode it alone several times, as did Zachary. We stayed out on the bunny slope for two and a half hours, practicing our control, and I showed Finn how to turn into her right foot and brake on her toe side.

By 3:30 we were all a little tired, and Zachary had fallen on his butt one too many times, so we packed up our stuff and headed home.

There was a point in the day where I was sitting on the slope in the sunshine, watching the two of them push off and glide down the hill, turning into the board or away from it, pushing out with their feet, and stopping upright, smiles on their faces, and it about made my heart explode with pride and joy for the both of them. And I was glad to be here, on this earth, under that warm sun, with a body that still works, strapped to a board so that I could stand on two feet and glide down behind them and tell them how fucking good they were doing.