Sledding 101

One of our criteria in choosing this house in New Paltz was sledding. Granted this was a low priority (good school system was a bit higher, really), but it was there nonetheless. For the most part, the hilliness of this house was related to a different criterion: I wanted good hills for mountain unicycling. Those hills are in the woods, however, which is not ideal sledding turf. By happy coincidence, the house is at the top of a small incline, and as it happens, there are three great sledding zones right in the backyard.

The first one we tried is exactly in the back of the house. It starts off fast and seems smooth, but it heads right for those woods, and because we didn't move a log-pile ahead of time, there are a bunch of logs and trees right in the path. The kids had fun, but it was a bit unnerving watching Maeve come to a stop atop a three-foot-high pyramid of trees only inches beofre tumbling face-first into bracken.

Next we tried the hill by the cottage. It's a bit of a softer dip, but it ends at the drive, and since no one is ever on this road, it's a lot safer. Unfortunately, because the snow was so deep (about 8-12 inches), the sledding was a bit dull, and since 2-year-old Maeve doesn't yet have a good pair of winter boots, she managed to get her little ankles so red that they looked like lobster claws. When the numbness in her legs wore off and the adrenaline finally petered out, she shrieked for twenty minutes from the icy pain in her bones and from the realization that winter sports can be dangerous without proper precautions, like good footwear.

Finally we hit on the best sled-run of our property: our driveway right after it's been plowed. Ben the Plowman had come by earlier in the day, so the drive up to our house was pretty clear, but there was enough snow for sledding, and the snow was hardpacked, making our $12 plastic toboggans sound like $12,000 luge sleds as we raced towards fluffy mounds of plowed snow at the bottom of the slope. The kids also played in the snowed-over playground, and Shirra reported that they had never moved so fast down that slide (thanks to a potent blend of icy slide and slick snowpants).

The kids had snow days on both Wednesday and yesterday. In those two days, they managed to go sledding 7 times, right in our backyard. That's six more times than they went sledding in Brooklyn in our five years there.