“Mom, how old was I exactly?”

She was asking how old she was when we first put her on cross-country skis and the answer is approximately three-and-a-quarter years old.

You might think that I could find maybe even one freakin’ picture of one or the other of the beach urchins on their first pair of skis. Not. We did own cameras back then. But you had to fuss around getting the film processed, negatives and all that stuff. You were stuck keeping (and paying for) pictures that didn’t turn out, you know, like when you accidentally take a picture of the inside of your pocket or whatever. Even if we’d had a camera with us, we were probably distracted by the guzzinto involved in putting a three-and-a-quarter-year-old on skis and an eight-month-old into a backpack.

But that little purple snowsuit is the approximate ski outfit that the little urchin wore. My main memory of that first ski outing is that due to some complicated arrangement of shifting the mouse backpack from one parent to the other, there was a period of about 30 seconds when the three-year-old was between parents and neither of us were quite in sight. I was skiing toward her, when I heard her cheerfully answer an unheard question from a well-meaning adult with, “No, I’m with my mommy and my daddy.” And she was, and about a split-second later, I came around the corner and into view. (And helicopter parents? This was *much* less dangerous than it sounds but you probably would have to be there to appreciate that.)

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