better is not always better

One evening last week, my husband and I picked up our seven year old daughter from a friend’s house. She had spent the afternoon playing and then stayed for dinner. (Why is it that someone else’s fish sticks always taste better than mine?)
Anyway, she came home later than usual. We pulled up to the driveway after eight o’clock.
Eight o’clock is a special time of night. Eight o’clock is bedtime for Abby and me time.
For me.
Mine.
Get it?
(Well, sometimes I do share it with Bob. I’m not entirely selfish you know.)
I was all ready to rush the little one up the stairs to bed so I could settle my self on the couch with Jane Austen, but then something happened. I looked out the car window.
The recent snow lay on our little hill glittering in the moonlight. I turned my head to the porch and there was the abandoned sled.
Just that morning we had spent twenty minutes stuffing ourselves into our snow gear. Abby’s pinky had refused to go into its own slot in her gloves. It preferred to double up with her ring finger and I had to remove her glove and try again several times before it would be coaxed into being alone. Then Abby’s hat made her head itch. Her boots were hard to put on and her sock had a wrinkle. All the while a new snow was outside beckoning we were inside getting increasingly frustrated with the scarf stuck in the jacket zipper.
Once we finally (angrily) got outside we only had a few minutes left to play before having to go back in, un-gear and head off to the day’s must-dos. The sled was left on the porch. Mom and daughter were thoroughly unsatisfied.
When I was a little girl growing up in Oregon, snow was a magical rarity, maybe two or three times a winter. I did not own a stitch of snow clothes. In order to keep our feet dry in our hand-me-down tennis shoes, my mom gave my brothers and I saved bread bags to put on over our socks. When our jeans got too wet and we were freezing we came into the house for some mothering.
Our home had no fireplace so we dragged the kitchen chairs to the oven. My mom would crank it up to about 300 degrees and put folded towels on the open door. There we would prop our frozen toes to thaw while we sipped hot cocoa. Once we were warm and dry, we’d slip those bread bags back on and head out for more cold, wet fun.
We made snow angels without snow pants. We made snowmen and had icicle sword fights without gloves. Sure it was cold. I remember my hands stinging when I came in the house. But I did not die. I didn’t even catch a cold. And I still had fun. My daughter has every cold weather comfort item out there, but somehow they seem to detract from rather than add to the experience.
And so this brings us back to the car and me looking out the window at that moonlight hill. The little girl in me woke up and said “C’mon woman, Jane Austen has been around for 200 hundred years, but this moment will be over in a second. Let’s play!”
I got my confused child out of the car in her capris and mary-janes and we grabbed the sled. It was amazing. The darkness seemed to ad to the thrill of the ride. Sledding our tiny front yard hill was no longer ordinary; it was a mysterious, exotic adventure. We came in the house half an hour later, wet, cold, and laughing.
As she got ready for bed, Abby kept asking me, “Mom, why did you let me do that?”
I guess I just remembered for a minute what it feels like to be a kid. And in this overstressed and over scheduled world, I want to make sure she knows too.