Marriage is all about compromise, and although I’m not sure Dave has learned to love being photographed on the regular, I have done my part by learning to love skiing.  Here’s the thing: if I have to be cold, I can easily be distracted by having fun and being surrounded by the pretty kind of winter (which is the exact opposite of the winter we’ve experienced at home).  For the second year in a row, we decided to take the family skiing in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, but the week leading up to our departure was enough to make us consider cancelling at the last minute. 

Let’s back up: just before Christmas, Jackson injured his finger.  What we thought was a simple jammed finger ended up being a fracture that required surgery and a surgical pin that stayed in his finger for 6 weeks.  When it all happened, we thought, “well at least he can get the pin out before we go skiing!  Yay!”  But it was not “yay.”  Just before the pin came out, he developed an infection in the bone that required another surgery and heavy antibiotics.  His finger was operated on less than two days before our departure and because of the infection, he had a wide, open wound that required cotton packing and was HORRIFICALLY painful for him, so much so that he was vomiting the day before we left.  We literally had a backpack of supplies for a small finger, wound care supplies, antibiotics, pain medicine, anti-nausea medicine, plus a lot of solutions needed for soaks, and after getting it all through TSA during the government shutdown, it felt victorious that we had made it through multiple mini-crises before we ever left the ground.  

All things considered, by the time he was skiing (with new mittens to secure his bandages and hand brace), he felt so much better and his finger healed quickly.  You can’t hold that kid back from anything.  While we were there, we rode snowmobiles, skied at night with hot air balloons lighting up the sky, ate tacos, wandered around town, in and out of stores stocked with cowboy boots and hats, and soaked our sore bodies in the hot tub (at least, some of us, sorry Jackson).

But the best part about Steamboat is the STARs program, where Carter can ski with an instructor who can best help him learn.  Seeing him happy and skiing is something I never imagined would be possible, and yet he was super excited to return to STARs this year.  Having special needs and traveling is really, really hard.  It requires him to be flexible, to break routine, and be frustrated by the inability to control the things around him.  I’m especially grateful for his opportunity to experience the world and get out of his comfort zone in a way that allows him to feel safe.  On the mountain, he’s afraid to fall, he gets scared when someone whips by him really fast or cuts him off, and he’s afraid of getting lost (which has happened . . . in Maine, a ski school actually LOST him).  Being in the STARs program allows him to feel safe, but the people who have taught him have given him so much more than that.  One day, after having lunch, he showed me where his instructor took him, in between the branches of this giant tree.  As we looked up, we saw all of these little birds that came down and ate part of his granola bar out of his hand.  To see him, a kid who struggles with so many things, be in the snow, on skis, happy and feeding tiny birds was as close to perfection as I can imagine.  So yeah, I’ve learned to love skiing, because it’s given me so many memories in return. This time, most of them include a cowboy hat.