Life stages through SLEDDING

1. Have your first child.
2. When your kid turns 2, go to store to buy proper boots, snowpants, scarf, mittens, hat and long underwear. Go to several different stores to look for the safest sled available - you know, the one with the back and seat belt. Buy other cool sleds, too.
3. Bundle everyone up, apply vaseline to your child's cheeks. Apply lip balm. Load up car with the 6 new sleds you bought (and the pump, in case the new tube sled deflates), and drive 17 miles across town to the best hill. Bring camera and camcorder. Stop at gas station to get fresh batteries.
4. Watch your husband go down the hill with your child, screaming WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE each time.
5. Videotape your child going down the hill at least 23 times.
6. Make jumps by gathering and packing large amounts of snow in strategic spots on the hill.
6. Take pics of your child eating snow. Put hand warmers in child's mittens. Wipe her nose.
7. Get different sleds every 10 minutes and go over jumps with each one, comparing speeds and height of jumps.
8. Talk to everyone you see, saying: isn't the weather beautiful tonight?!?!
9. Leave after 2 hours. Go home and drink hot chocolate with tons of marshmallows. Sit by the fireplace.
10. Upload and edit all the videos you took and forward them to friends and family, who of course are DYING to see them.

Several years later:

10. Have your second kid.
11. When this kid turns 5, dig out hand-me-down boots, snowpants and whatever else you can find in your musty basement. Wipe off the cobwebs with your shirt.
12. Put baggies in the boots cuz they probably leak.
13. Grab the two sleds - you know, the one that has a big crack down the middle and the other one that has a broken handle. Look for rope to fix handle. Give up on finding any rope.
14. Drive to the closest lame hill, which happens to be 1/2 block away.
15. Park the car and let your kid out.
16. Stay in car and watch kid go down hill, as you are already exhausted from the preparations to go sledding and your foot hurts. You feel a backache coming on, too.
17. Sit in car for an hour with the heat blasting, reading a week old paper with the dome light on.
18. Notice your kid and another kid repeatedly pushing each other down. Notice your kid getting run over by inner tubes full of roudy middle schoolers.
19. Yawn and look at your watch.
20. Roll down the window and beep your horn, waving your kid into the car. Time to go.
21. Come home and tell your kid how lucky she is to have a mom that takes her sledding.