Oh snowy day

With all of the sun and fog and toes in the lake, it would seem as though we haven’t had our fair share of winter.

I’m here to prove to you that not only has blustery weather passed through the Northeast corridor, but that we’ve also been taking advantage of the season. 

Some of you may recall that last year our winter season went down the tubes because our pipes froze and burst. I won’t go into the details, but despite all efforts to keep our house at a minimum temperature and turn the water off whenever we leave….sometimes the weather/housing construction gods are in cahoots and will foil your best efforts to maintain a flood-free zone. It was a mess and a three-month effort to clean up.

The good news is that new insulation has made our home much cozier than ever before, giving us renewed freedom to freeze our nose hairs off doing all manner of winter activity.

There’s the obvious winter sport: skiing….a favorite pastime, especially now that we have two down/one to go in our efforts to get our three kids on skis. This weekend I even used poles. Poles I tell you! No backwards inverted pizza as I steer a rickety kindergartener down the mountain. I was carving skis and planting poles and it was northing short of a miracle.

It may surprise you that New Jersey has skiing, but it shocked me to find out that our neighborhood ski area, Mountain Creek, has over 1,000 feet of vertical drop spread across 3 peaks. Look across the foothills and you can see the ridge of the Appalachian trail. If it weren’t the closest ski resort to Manhattan and overrun with a bunch of wild-on-foot yahoos, it would be pretty much perfect.

Those would be the fear-inducing yahoos. Do you feel my pain?

Moving on….to escape the crowds and get a little more time on snow, the kids came up with the semi-ingenious idea to have us tow them behind our golf cart. Our lake house is in a little community where the roads are privately-run, which means that golf carts are legal! Which….of course was a driving factor in choosing to buy a home in our neighborhood.

Can we all have a moment of silence to reflect on the best part of skiing?

That would be mine. Made by myself, for myself on the weekend that Rodney couldn’t come up with us. Ski weekends are hard as a solo parent, making a pomegranate margarita 100% necessary at the end of the day. I might have had two. And then finished things off with a warm Bailey’s & milk chaser. Because that’s how we rock it in Jersey.

While the next activity isn’t an outdoor activity per se, it’s the kind of activity that you do when it’s so cold outside that even the dog decides that outdoor bathroom breaks aren’t entirely necessary. 

One Darth Vader led to One Princess Leia, which very quickly led to two Princess Leias. Light sabers were fashioned out of broken croquet mallets, side buns were foisted into place, and the living room blankets were draped into futuristic ball gowns.

But I’m saving the best for last. Because in all of the five years that we’ve owned our lake house, we’ve never gotten to do this…

I’m sure that half are you are thinking “Wonderful!” and the rest are thinking “Oh dear, get those children off the ice!” If you fall into the second camp, rest assured that the ice was nearly a foot thick. Source: the non-skiing set of Jersey yahoos who were popping wheelies on 400 lb All-Terrain Vehicles all over the lake that afternoon.

Winter has been a veritable wonderland this year. Is it crazy to say that I’m hoping for snow until April? (cue the rotten tomatoes, and let’s take this discussion into the comments).

All the best for a wonderful, albeit slightly frozen week. (Unless you’re in the Southern Hemisphere and a frozen week = some kind of apocalyptic event. Which wouldn’t be fun for anyone.)