Skiing is believing even when done bregrudgingly

Until recently, I hadn’t been skiing since the late 1980s when my parents enrolled my brothers and me in weekly “Mogul Munchers” classes at Mt. Spokane. Not terribly outdoorsy by nature, my favorite part of these trips to the mountain was the car ride home when I could finally take off the torture devices known as ski boots and listen to the radio while snuggled into the backseat of our station wagon.

But my husband Logan is an avid snowboarder, and his dream has long been to spend a day on the mountain with his wife and kids. I finally relented last winter and agreed to head to the slopes. The skills I learned in “Mogul Munchers” served me well, and I was able to make it down the mountain with only a few minor mishaps. Skiing still felt like a near-death experience that was more of a hassle than it was worth, and I didn’t look forward to repeating the ordeal.

Then came this Christmas break when the extended Ditto family converged on an enormous cabin nestled next to a small ski mountain in northern Utah. Rumors of “everyone going skiing one day” were tossed around in the weeks leading up to our visit, but I paid little heed, thinking it would all blow over and no one would notice when, on the morning of the ski trip, I sing-songed everyone out the door and stayed behind in the cabin sipping hot cocoa and reading a novel in the blessed silence.

I should have known better. There is no escaping the Ditto Machine once it has been put into motion, and this trip to the ski mountain was no different. The night before the ski trip, I had a minor tantrum when I realized that most of our snow gear, which I had been carefully hoarding in our bedroom, had somehow gotten mixed in with everyone else’s gear in the basement.

Logan swooped in and helped me through that debacle, similar to a parent who manages the freak-out of a toddler who has dropped her cookie. With the gear situation figured out, I went to bed and prayed that I would die in my sleep, but no such luck. I woke up alive and began the arduous task of prepping my family for a day on the mountain.

Mobilizing the Allies on D-Day seems a simple task compared to getting 30-plus Dittos out the door for a day of skiing. There were missing ski boots, mismatched gloves, too-small long johns, poorly timed potty breaks and a dead car battery to boot. My patience for the entire ski experience was already wearing thin by the time we loaded everyone and their gear into various Suburbans and drove the short distance to the ski hill.

“Why are we doing this?” I muttered as we stood in an epic line to rent a snowboard so my daughter could try it for the first time. “What part of this is fun?” I thought as I juggled and dropped countless gloves, hand warmers and goggles while everyone geared up in the snow. “WHY IS SKIING EVEN A THING?!” I silently screamed as my 4-year-old face planted yet again, and I wrestled him to his feet amid the tangle of our skis.

Misery was the order of the day for the first hour or two. Logan took on the task of coaxing our reluctant 7-year-old down the mountain, and I hung on for dear life to the harness attached to our 4-year-old while he streaked down the hill like a demented Rudolph pulling a helpless Santa. But then things shifted. By the time we broke for lunch, I realized that even though my shins hurt, my hands were cold, and my clothes were wet, I was actually having fun.

It was a thrill to watch my oldest son bomb down the mountain on his snowboard knowing that it’s one of his favorite things in the world to do. I was impressed with my daughter’s grit as she endured the steep learning curve that comes with snowboarding for the first time. I felt loved by my 10-year-old who waited patiently for his slowpoke mom at the entrance to every chairlift so we could ride up together and chat along the way.

“This is why we do it,” I thought to myself as the day wound to a close grateful for the fun we’d had and the things I’d learned. But know this: If Logan asks me to go up again anytime soon, I’m seriously going to fake my own death.

Julia Ditto shares her life with her husband, six children and a random menagerie of farm animals in Spokane Valley. She can be reached at dittojulia@gmail.com.