>Snow Day

One nice thing about having older children is that they lose all desire to play in the snow.

I say this because we received a surprise snowfall of about four inches last night. Five years ago, this would have called for a maniacal search for coats, hats, mittens and boots. The little-used sleds would have been pulled from the garage’s deepest and dirtiest nooks and crannies. Our own neighborhood’s baby hills would not have been sufficient for my daredevil girls; instead, we would have driven ten minutes away to the Biggest Sledding Hill in All of Nashville, a steep, grassy incline with a very few trees and a wide ditch at the bottom, sufficient for keeping out-of-control sledders from getting spat out into the very busy road at the hill’s end.

Scores and scores of adults and children would line up at the top of the hill as if waiting to go on a water slide. Down we’d all go, one after another, the rich kids with real sleds deftly steering them around the slower sledders as they made their way down. The rest of us were stuck with plastic discs we’d bought at Kroger at the last minute. While fast, the discs spun us out of control across the snow, sometimes backward, sometimes forward, totally at the mercy of the snow drifts. Once on a disc, I careened headlong in a direct path toward two chatting teenagers. Helpless, I screamed at them to get out of the way, but they were much too cool to heed my advice. Instead, I slammed into them, knocking them both off their feet. By the time they’d recovered their senses, i was 100 feet away, shrieking as my disc spun around and around down the steep hill.

On that same visit, my oldest stepdaughter flew down the hill, zipped across the snow-covered parking lot, and became lodged beneath the bumper of a pickup truck. She had to wait until another of us got to the bottom and helped her out.

Good times.

We’d come back home with bruises and scrapes and aching bones. I would want nothing so much as to curl up in front of a fire and watch movies for the rest of the day. But no. I was the stepmother now, and that meant it was my responsibility to whip up hot chooclate and cookies and a hearty, scrumptious dinner. I would have to gather up all the wet clothes and launder them. I would have to clean up the trail of dirt and mud that had followed us inside from the snow.

Like I said, it’s a relief to be done with all that, at least for a few years. These days, snow is merely a perfect excuse for a Grey’s Anatomy marathon. Three-year-old Punky clamors to go outside, of course, but for her, playing in the snow merely means stomping around for an hour and sweeping it from the tops of low walls and patio furniture. This time, Hubs is home, so he’s on snow duty, dutifully following her in a trudge around and around the front yard as she chatters softly under her breath, fully involved in some sort of imaginary game involving horses and princesses and lots and lots of snow. Bruiser sleeps through it all in his room. And I type away on the computer beside a roaring fire in the fireplace.

In a few more years, more will be demanded of me, except for one thing. That hill was bulldozed in order to make a parking lot.

Thank God.

This post originally appeared on Parents.com.