I went downhill skiing for the first time in 25-odd years last weekend. This was, of course, because of the kids– when we were up at Lapland Lake for MLK weekend cross-country skiing, somebody mentioned to SteelyKid that she looked like she’d be good at downhill skiing, so she asked to try it. And The Pip is a determined Little Dude who feels very strongly that if his big sister is doing something then, by God, he’s going to do it, too.

I used to downhill ski fairly regularly up through college, taking advantage of student discounts, but stopped when I moved to the DC area for grad school because 1) there’s very little snow there, and 2) I had no money. Despite moving back up here back in 2001, I never picked skiing back up, because it’s very much not Kate’s kind of thing, and it never seemed like it would be a good idea to go solo. The kids asking to go was a good excuse, though, so we trucked everybody over to Maple Ski Ridge, rented gear, and hit the slopes.

Happily, as it turns out, there’s a significant amount of muscle memory involved in skiing, and I was able to pick it up again almost immediately. I’m not great from a technical standpoint, but I can stop and turn and keep myself under control enough even on the hardest slopes they have to offer (which it should be noted are not terribly impressive, because it’s a very small ski area…). As I noted to Kate, this means that I’m regularly going fast enough that if I wipe out it’s really going to suck, but I’m enjoying it.

The one thing I absolutely can’t do, though, is explain how I do what I’m doing. I’m not really doing the snowplow thing I remember learning back in the Ice Ages, it’s more just a shifting of weight from one leg to the other, but I couldn’t begin to describe how to do it. I knew that would be the case, though, which is why we went to Maple Ridge in the first place, because lots of folks at work praised their ski school, so we signed the kids up for a lesson the first time we went.

This had a couple of benefits, chiefly the fact that the instructor teaching SteelyKid and The Pip the basics does this on a regular basis and knows the language to use to describe it to kids. More than that, though, she’s not me, and as it turns out that makes a world of difference. When it comes to teaching skills or coaching sports, the kids are way more willing to take instruction and coaching from a different adult.

This is not a new thing, of course, and has been most acute with SteelyKid, whose rec soccer team I coached for a couple of years. Attempts to get her to take her turn playing goalie… did not end well, let’s just leave it at that. This year I switched to coaching The Pip’s team, and things went more smoothly for her with a different coach. And the less said about our experience with me as her coach in rec basketball, the better.

In the case of skiing, the problem wasn’t SteelyKid (who just naturally excels at any activity requiring balance and coordination, and if you can explain how that comes out of the combination of my genes and Kate’s, there’s likely a Nobel in it for you). In this case, The Pip was the problem. Maple Ridge only has a single “green circle” hill with a rope tow to get kids to the top, and SteelyKid very quickly moved beyond that, so she came up the chair lift with me to their one “blue square” trail. This is genuinely pretty steep at the top, and on her first run she ended up missing a turn and bombing straight down the hill at high speed, which she found scary, but not enough to deter her. By the end of our second visit this past weekend, she was flying down the “black diamond” trails.

(Here’s some shaky cell-phone video from the top of the blue hill on her first day of skiing:

SteelyKid approved putting this on YouTube, for the record.)

The Pip was initially content to stay on the rope tow, but as noted above, he’s a determined Little Dude, and if his sister’s doing something fun, then he’s going to do it, too. So after a while, he showed up at the lift line, demanding to come up with us.

That… did not go smoothly. When we got to the top of the hill, he exclaimed “It didn’t look this steep from the bottom!!!” I tried my best to show him how to do the back-and-forth trick to control speed, but he wasn’t really having it, and fell down every time he was supposed to turn. And unlike his naturally graceful sister, when he falls on skis he’s like a baby deer– arms, legs, and skis splayed all over the place, and getting him back upright is an incredibly complicated and wobbly process. After taking about ten minutes to cover a quarter of the slope, we just pointed his skis in the right general direction, and sent him down on his butt.

Despite declaring “New rule: No skiing down hills nine thousand times taller than Dad,” though, he demanded another run at it this past weekend. Which also was less than completely successful, though we did a little better when I suggested he follow and imitate SteelyKid. It still ended with a baby-deer fall and sliding down two-thirds of the hill on his butt, though.

Bringing it back around to the coaching thing, though, I kind of suspect that had we sent him up there with an instructor who wasn’t me, he would’ve made it, because there was an element of freaking out that I don’t think he would’ve had with a different adult in charge. (And, of course, they would be better able to explain what he needs to do to make the turns at the sides of the slope…)

Earlier in the winter, he signed up for a youth wrestling program, and a couple of times in that he got paired up with a slightly hyper kid who knocked him around a bit. At one point, there were some tears, and I fully expected him to want to quit, but he stuck it out after a brief conversation with one of the coaches. I kept out of sight back by the door, because I was pretty sure that if I got involved it would be the end of wrestling.

When I talked to him after, and said I was proud of him for not giving up, he gave me a weird look and said “Dad, it’s wrestling practice. There’s no quitting in practice.” That seemed kind of backwards to me, but like I said, he’s a stubborn Little Dude, particularly when I’m not involved.

I expect we’ve got at least a couple more ski trips in our future before this winter ends, and I’m pretty sure that even if he just went with me and SteelyKid, he’d make it down that hill after about two more attempts, because that’s how he operates. We’ll get him another lesson, though, because I think the process will go a lot more smoothly with a different adult in charge explaining what needs to happen. And I think he’s really only about one lesson away from being able to handle that hill.

That will make The Pip enormously happy, of course, but probably the happiest person when he makes that leap will be Kate, who will no longer be required to stand out in the cold at the bottom of the rope tow hill in case The Pip skis off into the woods…