Adventures with Kids: Camp, Ski, Hike, Bike, Live
Ski-Racing Moms: Support Crew with Benefits. Horse moms, swim moms, and soccer moms have nothing on ski racing moms. The proof is in the powder. A friend was recently telling me about the perils of being a horse mom. A corporate executive by weekday, she mucks out horse poop from [...]
Mud Season: Time to Store Your Gear Just yesterday the trees were budding and the robins were singing. Today it’s dumping. Ridiculous spring weather aside, for most people it’s time to store the skis, snowboards, and boots, and put away the parkas and ski pants. When a brand-new gear setup [...]
A recent day at Beaver Creek meant girl power, inspiration from a World Cup ski racer, and a serious overdose of pink. When your child is having a pivotal life-changing moment, you wouldn’t necessarily know it. You probably won’t find out until much later. Certainly when they ask for money [...]
Keeping kids’ hands warm is the Holy Grail of temperature regulation when skiing and snowboarding. When your little chickadees have toasty fingers, they’ll stay out longer and ski more—which means you get to ski more. It’s win-win. Try these tips, and if all else fails, wrap small hands around a [...]
Better than Band Camp: Steamboat’s Speed Camp for Ski Racers My tweenage son, who weighs in at a willowy 70 pounds, recently was clocked at 59 miles per hour. He was not in a car. Or on a bike, for that matter. He was balled up in a tuck, sliding [...]
Little Chickadees at the Birds of Prey If you and your kids have never watched a World Cup ski race live and in person, you need to add it to your family’s To-Do List. In early December, I spent the day at Beaver Creek watching a men’s GS race on [...]
True Confessions of Parenting Gone Wrong (and how you can create your own ad campaign out of it) Nobody’s perfect, right? Try as we may to channel our inner June and Ward Cleaver, most of us fall short every now and again. I like to call these transgressions from perfection [...]
Seriously. What Was I thinking? I had business lunch recently with a woman who I hadn’t met before. We soon discovered a shared history of overzealous wedding planning, a fondness for camping with kids, and the dubious distinction of having served as a laundromat attendant. It must be said, however, [...]
Autumn is the Perfect Time to Turn Leaves into Roosters and Turtles. With the arrival of fall, leaves are bursting in fiery shades of gold, crimson, and orange. My favorite are the ones that remain stubbornly green at the center but rimmed with red and yellow. As if they’re not [...]
Adventure racing requires teamwork. What happens when serial squabblers (kids, that is) compete? My children bicker incessantly over the most inane things. Who goes first at piano lessons. Who gets the blue water bottle. They argue over cupcakes, radio stations, pizza slices, hunks of watermelon, stuffies, lacrosse pads, and ski [...]
High Adventure on Isle au Haut Click here to read Part I It wasn’t total deprivation. We did have a bag of those enormous oversized marshmallows, dark chocolate chips, and graham crackers. The kids roasted the marshmallows over a roaring fire and stuffed themselves with s’mores. After dinner we climbed [...]
High Adventure on Isle au Haut In my twenties, my hiking shoes were a well-worn pair of Timberland work boots. I’d trekked in them from the Uintas to the Black Hills to the Gunks. They’ left a trail of knobby prints around the Annapurna circuit in Nepal and through the [...]
I have a burly dual-suspension Proflex mountain bike that dates from the late 1990s. Amazingly, I now see this bike characterized on the Internet as “vintage.” Mine is in mint condition. In the first few years I owned the beast (the bike weighs about 7 million pounds), I did [...]
This summer, after a decade-long hiatus from mountain biking—and when I say mountain biking, I mean the blood-on-your-knees, dirt-in-your-teeth variety—I was thrilled to find myself navigating roots and rocks and whoop-de-doos on a dirt trail with my two boys, ages 8 and 11. Until this point, my kids hadn’t done [...]
The first rule of hiking with kids is this: Never say “hike.” It’s a four-letter word. So earlier this week, when I took the kids on a hike to Walden Ponds, I told them we were going on an adventure. An outdoor nature treasure hunt. Arghhhhh! They were gung ho. [...]
So this morning, I was waiting in the lobby with two shopping carts of camping gear to do a segment on CW2’s Daybreak morning TV show in Denver, and the receptionist asked me to just hold up a minute. They were going to send another guest up first. Just happened [...]
On my strangest mother’s day ever, I found myself ruminating on high school massacres and fetal microchimeras. This past mother’s day, while most other moms were out eating Eggs Benedict and French toast, I was on an airplane, flying back from a book event in San Francisco. For reasons unknown, [...]
There is a blob of red wax on my black leather Dansko clogs. This is my fault for not wearing work boots, I suppose, but still. The wax blob represents the indignity of my new job as a ski tuner. I can now add that to my resume, which currently [...]
Twenty-five years after a rollicking spring break trip to Alta, Utah, one mom returns on a girls’ trip of another sort. There’s nothing better than being with your kids. Except maybe not being with them. If you’ve ever snuck away on a girl’s trip—or even if you’ve spent the evening [...]
I Love You, But Yuck! Let me start with this disclaimer: I adore my kids. They are delightful creatures: sweet, charming, and downright loveable. When I hug them, I bury my nose in the soft folds of their necks and try to breathe them right in. I would step in [...]
Or “Why I sent out my holiday cards in March” There’s a good reason I mailed my Christmas cards in March. Really there is. This season we can count three ski racers in our brood. And as long as we’re counting, consider these numbers: Our 11 year old has some [...]
Based on a 1956 study by a Princeton psychologist, Miller’s Law suggests our short-term memory can hold a maximum of only seven items. My camping checklist has 214 items on it, I am not kidding. And unless your cranium has considerably more RAM than the average person, what you need [...]
When it comes to dessert, gastronomes would likely consider the Jet-Puff marshmallow to be a tad lowbrow. A little bit June Cleaver. If you’re like me, you might even have bizarre memories of mini-marshmallows and mandarin oranges suspended in your Jell-O. For some strange reason, green Jell-O, with lots of [...]
Terms of Endearment “C’mon pumpkin butter, let’s go.” Pumpkin butter? I overheard a mom using this pet name on her toddler the other day. I thought I’d heard them all. Used them all myself. Bunny, sweetie-pie, dumpling. Considering the incredible amount of careful consideration and hand-wringing debate parents put into [...]
Cakes in Camp A have a friend who was long in the habit of serving those little boxes of cereal for breakfast when camping. Fruit Loops, Apple Jacks. That sort of thing. And to be sure, her family could evacuate camp and get home in short order. We’ve always gone for [...]
There’s a good reason that my parents dumped my five brothers and sisters and I into the ski racing program before we could successfully negotiate a T-bar. Having recently immigrated to the US from Ireland, they were ill-prepared to teach a half dozen little people to ski. They were taking [...]
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