Snowboarding???

Heaven help us, Blake's school had a ski/snowboarding trip for Honor Roll students on Friday!  He had no interest in going until they started having meetings about it had them fit for their skis/boards, but  I am happy to report that we made it home via the school bus rather than an ambulance!  This is how he started the day...

...but this is what most of the day looked like...

We had a feeling this was how it would end up since he is a pretty big pansy when it come to trying new things.  Anybody who hadn't been before had to take lessons first before they were suppose to take on the mountain themselves, which turned out to be a good thing since I had no clue what I was doing to help him.

They ended up having them only strap one foot into the board and treating it more like a skateboard, which was fine except Blake would always have the board pointing straight down the hill when trying to stand back up and was shocked/mad when it would slide back out from underneath him...not to mention the fact that if he started going for more than 10 feet he would get scared and sit down.  Then he would try to stand up with all his weight on the leg/foot that was strapped to the board, with the board pointing downhill and freaked when the board slipped out from underneath him again.

Needless to say after lessons he was excited to head to the lodge and eat lunch with NO intentions of going back out again.  I was glad when his friends convinced him to go try the bunny hill with them and I stayed in the lodge.

This was the ski lift for the bunny slope.  If you were skiing you straddled the circle thing and it pulled you up, however snowboarding with feet strapped to a board made that impossible, so you just tucked it under your arm.  It was pretty funny to watch Blake and his friends TRY to figure it out, they fell over and over and over and over again!  They finally got it after TONS of attempts...Blake, no such luck.  So he would unstrap his feet from his board, walk about half way up the bunny hill, strap his board back on and ride down.  After a few falls he actually got the hang of snowboarding!

He had a handful of good runs and was actually starting to have fun with it!

However, see that line of people at the bottom of the bunny hill?

Blake and his friends didn't figure out how to stop so they would crash at the bottom so they wouldn't take out the kids who were waiting in line for the ski lift.  Eventually he got tired of going down once for every three or four times his friends were able to go down since they had figured out the lift and headed back to try to figure it out again...

This time he made it about half way up before falling, but fell hard...and then the person behind him hit him.  He was done!  We're talking full melt down!  So since there was only about an hour before they had to start packing up I made him check in his equipment and hang out at the lodge.  He got frustrated that he struggled so much that day.  Some of his friends caught on quick and spent most of the day on the mountain skiing/boarding on the regular trails, some stuck to the bunny hills all day and there were a few that couldn't even figure out how to make it down the bunny hill.  So he wasn't the worst at it, but of course he didn't see it that way.  I was sad that I wasn't feeling up to renting equipment and trying it but definitely will next year!