It's All Fun and Games Until.......

Christmas Eve plus a foot of new snow in the past few days equals one thing: tubing! We have a great tubing hill right in our neighborhood and, since we are the only little kids in the neighborhood, the lines are pretty short.


Getting the little ones ready is half the battle. Dylan thinks he looks GOOOOOD in his over the knee socks and onesie though.

It was a good thing he also added more layers. The snow is pretty deep. He is standing up in this shot. I know he isn't really tall but the snow this winter is almost unbelievable.

Dylan loved going down the hill. Who could blame him? He rode down and was hauled back up on the sled he rode down on. It was fun both directions!

This is Logan and Ethan at the bottom of the hill. They decided to go snow swimming and see how far they could get. Their energy for swimming ran out long before the undisturbed snow.

Ethan loves tubing. He climbs his little legs back up the hill after each run and can almost carry his tube too.

Toward the end, Dylan's patience began to wear out. He wanted to go down the hill now! and wasn't waiting for Gary or the sled. Ethan was at the bottom of the hill calling him and Dylan would yell back, "I coming Eth, I coming!"

Logan and Thomas started jumping off the sled at the bottom into the fresh powder. That was the beginning of .....

snow throws. Dylan kept asking for his turn so Gary threw him into the snow. He loved the throwing part.

Not so much the snow in the face landing part.

Ethan couldn't get enough of it. He laughed the whole time and loved landing in the deep, soft snow.

Getting out of the hole was a different story. It's hard when you have short legs.

Logan could do it over and over. Gary could throw them pretty far.

It started to look like they fell from the sky. Not close enough to any foot prints to look like they'd jumped and little other explanation of how they got there.

It was a pretty fun two hours. It all came to a screeching halt on the almost last run down the mountain. Ethan and Dylan were at the bottom and Gary, Thomas, Logan and myself were taking the big black sled on a fast run to see how far we could go with all the weight we had piled in. It's a goose decoy sled and does have quite a bit of room but we discovered the space limit. We piled in, biggest to smallest, and off we went. About a third of the way down the hill was a slight bump, not launch you into the air bump but enough you knew it was there each time. That was our demise.

We hit the bump and Logan, at the front of the sled, fell out. Not overboard, out of the way. Not out but with a leg or arm still in front of the fast moving sled. Not even half out dragging behind. Out, face first into the snow with the sled immediately behind him with no where to go but over him. We ran right over the top of him and, there he was, face first in the snow with sled tracks up his back.

"I had my eyes open, Dad, and I could see everything and then it all just went black."

The good news is that he is okay. The bad news is that he now tells people he was "road kill" and we aren't totally sure if he ended up with a concussion from the ordeal. A Christmas story to remember.