Back to (Ski) School

When we were planning this vacation, Dennis and I had this super-clever plan of letting the kids stay up later and later each night, easing them ahead a few time zones.  It would be wonderful, we thought, if the kids could stay awake until midnight for the New Year's Eve we're planning to spend in Zürich. Better yet, it would help with our reintegration to America, where they're expected to show up, fresh and bright-eyed, in their classrooms on the morning of January 3rd.

But we also had a super-clever plan of putting the kids in ski school all this week. They loved the skiing in Austria last February, and if all three kids skied all day, well, then Dennis and I could, too.

Of course, you see the problem with these two plans immediately, but sometimes we're not the most forward-thinking. When the boys have had long, full days, they're usually unconscious from 7:00 to 7:00, and Ella still needs about ten hours of rest. Right. We forgot to budget time for sleep.

So our two plans are at odds. But the foot of the slopes is within walking distance and the sun is shining in Austria.  The choice is clear: we'll deal with the jet lag when it comes. Ski school it is!

Although, with all of the fresh air and activity that we had yesterday, our kids were a mess when we put them to bed last night.  Alex was grouchy and Ella was beside herself with anxiety about skiing the next morning: when I switched off her light, she swore she simply wasn't going up there on that mountain, no way, no how.  We'll talk about it in the morning, I told her.

What a difference a night of sleep makes. Ella woke up cautiously excited about heading up the mountain, and her optimism rubbed off on Alex, who, as he shoveled in his pancakes, seemed perfectly happy to tackle anything the day brought.

But poor Joey didn't know what was going on, and that was a bit of a problem.  His own mini ski school, called "Gentle Beginnings," is for two hours each morning on the play slope right outside our hotel.  It's a class just for 3- and 4-year-olds, and the instructor returns the little ones to our hotel when they're done, for lunch and play.

The day care said it would be easiest for them if we dropped Joey off early and left them to suit him up, which certainly would be easier for us, too: I'll scarcely miss the fun of packing a three-year-old in heavy clothes and even heavier plastic boots. But when we handed Joey over, a look of distress crossed his face. "But...but...what 'bout Awex?"  His concerned protests quickly switched to panic as he realized we meant to abandon him, without even the comfort of his brother: I'm afraid we could hear him crying as we walked away to the cellar for our skis.

And Alex, sweet boy that he is, reached out to hug his fretful brother immediately, but as he comforted Joey, he absorbed his brother's fear. Where he had been jaunty, now he was upset and frightened.  As we stuffed him in his ski boots, he tried every angle he could think of, desperate to say the magic phrase that would release him from his fate and let him stay behind with Joey. "I'm super itchy!" "I can't get my boots on!" "My pants aren't tucked in right!" "I'm too tired!" "It's too hot!" "It's too cold!" "I don't wanna!"

Do you remember, back in February, when Dennis and I stood on the sidelines and watched our kids' first exposure to Austrian ski school.  Do you remember how aghast we were when we watched a little boy, flat on his back, weeping, adjacent to the line for the lift, while his mother glared at him with flinty eyes and barked "Stand!"

Oh, dear. Joey's not so sure about ski school.

Well, either Dennis and I are just exhausted and need a little back-up, or we've become a little more calloused, but neither Dennis nor I lent much of an ear to poor Alex.  "Stand!"

To be fair to Alex, the trip up the mountain wasn't exactly easy.  While we could have walked to the lifts, it's not a fun walk when you're wearing ski boots. But there's a little underground train that runs the length of Serfaus: the closest station is about two blocks from our hotel, and it runs to a lift that drops us off right at the snow park where the kids all have skiing lessons.  In theory, it sounds easy, but when you throw in a ten-minute wait in the train station, where you're jostled by over a hundred other impatient kids and their parents, it somehow gets harder.

By the time we got to the top of the mountain, Alex had worked himself into a full melodramatic fuss. We still could have taken him back home, but it didn't feel like the best thing to do for him.  At this point he was only fearing his own imagination, so we left him to a discover a gentler reality.  And, sure enough, when we circled back a fifteen minutes later to spy on the kids, he looked happy as can be, running loops from the magic carpet to the slopes and back again.

At the end of the day, Ella reported that she had made 174 runs down her little practice hill. "But Alex only had about 130. He took lots of naps." And, sure enough, when Dennis retrieved Alex, he was kicking back in an enormous inflatable chair, as all the other kids (the suckers!) skied diligently around him.

As unsympathetic as we must have seemed to Alex, Dennis and I spent most of the day talking about him, wondering what we should have him do for the rest of the week.  Even before Ella reported on his frequent naps, we decided that the day was probably too long and too much for him.  But the thing was, when he was done with the day, he was happy and had clearly had fun. Of course he did: skiing is awesome! All the same, later in the day, when we asked him if he wanted to go back to ski school tomorrow, his answer was succinct: "N-n-nope!"

Here's the thing: in Austria, skiing is a way of life, and parents consider it extremely important that their kids know how to get down a slope, mountainous as the country is.  It's kind of like swimming in America.  But honestly, Dennis and I could really care less whether our kids know how to ski.  We want this week to be a reward for a long, complicated year.  So, tomorrow, maybe we'll try something else.

It's pretty here.

 Meanwhile, Dennis and I had a really nice time together on the mountain. We stayed on the nursery slopes, although really, this mountain is mostly easy runs.  There are a lot of broad, gentle slopes without much to hit.

Dennis usually snowboards, but he's trying an experiment this week.  In general, European slopes don't seem to be very board friendly, with lots of flat stretches. Also, it'll certainly be easier for Dennis to play in the mountains with our children, being on skis himself.  But there's plenty of room for him to figure things out, and I'm happy to spend all my time on the easy slopes: I'm really in it for the scenery, anyway.

Since we're just getting our ski legs, we took frequent breaks for coffee: there's a chalet right next to the snow garden where the kids are taking their lessons with an incredible view. And when we were well and truly tired, we skied all the way down the mountain to our hotel, trading our skis for a slice of cake.  It would be easier, we reasoned, to maneuver the kids down the lifts if we were wearing comfortable boots and weren't lugging our equipment.

We walked the length of Serfaus to the lifts, stopping in the infirmary to get some decongestant for my rapidly blooming cold.  Sad to say, there were already a few people in there, getting legs and arms bandaged, right at the beginning of their ski holiday: a cautionary tale.

Spotted in Serfaus: Bonderosa?
So close.

Right at the base of the lift, Dennis discovered that he'd lost his lift pass. A decade ago, on a ski trip to Breckenridge, one of our party lost his lift pass.  Poor as we all were then, it was a really sad and desperate thing, for there was no way that paper hang-tag could be found, and it's not the sort of thing they reimbursed. Ah, but technology's grand: our pass is now a little plastic card that electronically trips the entrance gates to the lifts.  The fee for replacing it was just ten francs, although we managed to avoid even that: the ticket vendor called our hotel and let us know that someone had found our card in the ski storage room and turned it in for us. Neat!

But, to avoid that ten-franc fee, one of us had to collect the kids on our own, since we didn't have time to run back to the hotel before going up the mountain. I nominated Dennis, who graciously accepted, and so I enjoyed a leisurely walk back through Serfaus. I stopped at a drug store, where I bought Ella some of the Lustiges Tachenbuch, the Donald Duck comics that she loves so much, and which she devoured greedily this evening while ignoring her dinner.

I also paused in a sausage shop, looking to pick up a few last Christmas presents for my family. The man behind the counter not only humored me by pretending to understand my fractured German, but he also poured me a generous glass of raspberry cordial, which turned out to be just the thing after a day of the slopes. Of course, everything went exactly according to the butcher's plan: we'll be traveling home with half a suitcase full of Tyrol sausage and other cured meats.

When we got back to the hotel, we found Joey in the playroom, curled up on the bench like a puppy.

But he woke up as soon as he heard his siblings' voices, and the three of them ran around together on the playground until dinner, and then again, after.

That, after five hours of fresh air and skiing.  Perhaps we're going about this wrong and we need to find a more rigorous ski school?

Stand!