Snow Tubing with Phi Bensa Zoe

We went up to visit our friends the Porterfields who had the shocking audacity to move North without us. So, this must have been Phi Bensa Zoe gym class? Indeed. Veronica had the awesome idea that we should drive up to Pennsylvania and go snow tubing at Liberty Mountain. There are not a lot of children for whom driving 3 hours only to drive another 2 hours to spend 2 hours tubing and then another 2 hours in the car would be worth it. For these children, it was TOTALLY worth it. Here they are waiting for the shuttle:



When we arrived at the tubing hill, my heart sank. It looked huge, fast, and we were immediately told that we couldn't go with our younger ones -- they had to go on their own. I was so proud and amazed that *all* the kids tried the hill, no one freaked out or hung back, and while Phillip declined to repeat his run after bravely giving it a shot, the rest of them went up and down the hill about a million times.



Benny, having looked over the situation, asked for "self responsibility," which I gave him with the understanding that he and Zoe (both now nine years old) would stick together. They did, and they did great having self responsibility. That alone was worth the effort of getting up there. But then there was Sadie Grace. She was a MANIAC. She loved tubing -- here's a video of one of her runs:



Did you hear her report that she said, "Woo hoo!" I can attest that she did. She said "Woo hoo!" Crammed into that tube with only her little head and her Dora boots sticking out, she woo-hooed her way down that big old hill. And Veronica and I had our moments too -- me going down face first and her circumspectly sitting upright in her tube, hair flying in the wind.



The children definitely experienced total happiness.



In Sadie's words, it was "super fun."