Skiing beats cartoons any day ~ January 16, 1992

David Heiller

“Come on, kids, we’re going skiing.”

I made that statement on Saturday morning, and it didn’t sit well with Noah, Malika, and Jake. They had watched three hours of cartoons. Their eyes were glazed over. They were hypnotized by laugh tracks and sound effects and chocolate covered cereal commercials that are SO nutritious. Hey, that’s what the announcer said.

Their grumbling didn’t last long. Off went Bugs Bunny. Out went the kids. On went the skis. And along came the old man with a collie and two oranges and a bottle of apple juice.

Take it from the old man: what a day for skiing it was! Temperature in the twenties. Sun shining. Three inches of new snow over an old ski trail. You folks who have gone south for the winter don’t know what you are missing. You kids who are still watching cartoons don’t either.

Skiing, and turning around, and talking lead to this.
She doesn't seem too mind much though, does she?

Jake and Noah led the way. They quickly disappeared. That’s not hard with Mollie and me in the rear. Six-year-old girls like to talk while they ski. They talk about friends and school and Barbies and grandmas. They turn around when they talk. They fall when they turn around. You end up travelling about one-quarter mile an hour.

That’s all right though. Getting out is what’s important. That’s what I keep telling myself when I want to zoom past her and the boys in those long, easy strides of the good old days.

We finally caught Noah and Jake at the deer stand. We ate the two oranges. There’s nothing sweeter than an orange on a ski trip. We drank apple juice. Mollie wanted to drink the orange juice in the plastic milk bottle in the deer stand. It was frozen. I explained that it wasn’t juice at all, that when deer hunters have to go potty, they don’t like to leave the stand and, well, you know.

The kids understood all right. In fact, it started quite a lively conversation, which I will NOT repeat. Such things sure fascinate eight-year-old boys.

Let's go!

Jake and I skied on. He moved along steadily. I kept up with him, but barely. It won’t be long until he is faster than me. I’d never admit that to him, or to Noah, who claims every so often that he will someday run faster than me.

“You’ll never be faster than me,” I say as if there is no room for argument. One of these days he and his friend Jake will prove me wrong. Even Malika will quit her chattering, face forward, and glide away from me.

I won’t mind a bit if we are skiing on a day like that one last Saturday morning.

I’ll even put up with the arguing that came when Malika kicked snow down on Noah from the deer stand. I’ll contend with helping a six-year-old girl go the bathroom on a ski trail wearing a snowsuit. (I’m glad I’m a boy for that reason alone.)

Days like last Saturday make me thankful for snow and skis and kids and good health. It makes me thankful for people like Sam Cook, who wrote a column filled with insight in the Duluth New-Tribune on January 10.

Sam’s thoughts and experiences often hit home with me, and that one was no exception. He wrote:

It is possible to buy your child Nintendo games and still take him or her fishing. It’s possible to plop your kids in front of a rented video for a couple hours and still go hunting on the weekend.

But my guess is the more we expose our kids to Nintendos and movies and malls, the less likely it is they’re going to climb up on our laps and ask us if they can come with us fishing on the weekend.

Or skiing. Forgive me for preaching, but Sam Cook is right. It’s sometimes much easier to leave the cartoons on. I’m sometimes guilty of that. But then we miss ski trips and oranges and juice bottles and all those other things that make life fun for children and us parents.