The Giving Ski

I was gung-ho on teaching my two boys to ski this season (for purely selfish reasons . . . I love to snowboard and this gives me an excuse to go) and after several days of ski school and some hairy trips down the mountain trying to help them while on my snowboard, I am proud to say that they can ski, and now that they've learned, there's part of me that wishes they would unlearn, because as a parent it is petrifying to see your progeny hurtle down an icy mountain, when you know that they don't make good decisions anywhere (moments before we drove from the hotel over to Windham, I watched my older son-- who is seven and should know better-- trying to stuff a rectangular Lego box into the round hole of a ruck sack, and he was jamming it in long ways and it was stuck, and he couldn't figure out to turn the box on it's side and slide it in) but I guess it's like anything else you give your children, like the ability to ride a bike, you imagine that it will create wonderful scenes of family unity, but instead they take the skill and use it to wreak havoc and chaos . . . perhaps I should have taught them to play tennis, how much havoc can you cause with a tennis ball?