What a Weekend

What a weekend. Oy.

Friday Tabby went home from school with her bestie to start celebrating her bestie’s birthday early. She was gone until late in the evening, so we had a quiet evening at home with Ben – made cookies, prepped for skiing. Just before we needed to pick Tabby up, we ran a couple of errands, including a stop at Target. I glanced through the dollar bin in anticipation of Tabby’s Valentine’s class party and didn’t see much. Ben, however, fell madly in love with a small stuffed dog in the approximately 2 seconds he laid eyes on him. When we said a perfectly-normal “no” to his request to bring him home, we were treated to a 30 minute screech fest fit. This is not normal of Ben. He has mostly recovered from the temper tantrum stage and it was quite a BAD surprise.

Then Saturday… A few weeks ago we agreed to go to the mountains with a bunch of friends. It was sort of an against-our-better-judgement scenario because of all the work we still need to finish before we list our house, but we’d been working really hard and figured “What the heck?” we can take a day off. The plan was to leave Denver early Saturday, get to the slopes in plenty of time, enjoy a nice day, have a nice dinner, sleep our 8 hours and head back to town early.

Best laid plans.

We got going early – not quite as early as we’d planned, but still pretty early. Unfortunately (we found out much later) there’d been an early morning accident that had already hosed the drive. We spent over 3 hours for a 1 hour drive. The kids were well-behaved, plugged into their TVs and we only had a couple of incidents, aside from us wanting to gouge our eyes out from stop-and-go frustration.

One, unfortunately, was when my sister (who decided to join us last minute) had to help Ben pee in a cup – because there wasn’t much of a choice – didn’t go perfectly cleanly. Err …. eew. And the other right before we reached our destination and another car cut us off and we almost hit them. Luckily Matt is a very skilled crap-conditions driver and we avoided collision.

Once we got there, the day, which had supposed to have been nasty, was lovely and we had a few great hours of skiing. The kids were into it. The weather was perfect and other than some small incidents – Tabby’s pass got lost somewhere between the car and the slopes and Ben lost his ski on the first chairlift ride – it was great. We took a dip in the pool and hot tub before we went to our hotel room to get ready for dinner.

Dinner was probably the easiest time. The kids went to the Kids’ Club and the adults had a nice dinner with multiple adult beverages and perfect viewing of the playoff game. Our allotted 3 hours went really quickly and we picked the kids up right around 9. When we got back to the hotel room, I gave the kids a choice of either sleeping on the floor “camping style!!!” with my much-coveted super-soft green blanket or in the other bed with Aunt Gaga.

My normally mild-mannered 6 year old decided then and there that this was a have-her-cake-and-eat-it-too situation and she was going to have both come hell or high water! So we were treated to another colossal meltdown courtesy of the other kiddo. Making this even more fun was the fact that we were in a hotel and had nowhere else to go and I was constantly worried we were disturbing everyone in the building and our friends next door in particular.

Finally after we threatened (and MEANT IT) to go home,  she calmed down and we all went to bed and got some halfway decent sleep.

The kids were up early as usual and we knew we might have a long drive back to Denver, so we decided to head out. We’d talked about having breakfast with friends before leaving, but when Matt checked the travel advisory site right before we left, he found that things were already looking grim and we bailed on breakfast and headed home.

Grim was a sort of understatement. We had intermittent white-out conditions with blowing snow and icy roads. The only saving grace was that we never had them at the same time. It was slow, white-knuckle driving. The kids, once again plugged into their DVDs, behaved very well and there were only a few very scary moments – one complete white out when I really thought we should just turn around. But once again, a 1 hour drive took us almost three going home.

So about 6 hours of driving for about 4 hours of skiing, 3 hours of adult time and a crappy night’s sleep. Really not a great ROI.

Once we got back, we had unpacking, laundry, grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning to do which left us with no time to actually make progress on our house. It’s mostly our own fault, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating. At least the Broncos won.