Snowboarding or not...

As some of you may have seen on my Facebook page, we went up to Winter Park on Thursday to take a family lesson through the adaptive ski program. Going skiing/snowboarding as a family is something we've really enjoyed the past few winters and is something we wanted to figure out a way to get back to.  Winter Park has an amazing disabled skier/snowboarder program as well as offering a family lesson, so it seemed like the perfect fit. It wasn't just about getting Jake back on his snowboard, but doing it as a family. We didn't want to go up and put Jake in his own lesson and have the rest of us go ski together.

I had very high hopes for our afternoon lesson and envisioned the four of us and an instructor going up on the mountain together and her assisting Jake on an adapted snowboard. I'd seen pictures of the adapted snowboards...they had a metal bar that looks like an upside down square U, so the instructor would face Jake and do all the carving and turning for him. We thought the snowboarding would be perfect with his left ankle issues since his feet are stationary on the board. I had talked to his PT's and they agreed to give him a one day break in-between his casts so we could go. Things didn't go quite as planned...

Long story short, snowboarding was a complete bust and Jake ended up in tears. He was given a regular board, not an adaptive board and his left leg just isn't strong enough yet. In retrospect, trying to go right after he got a cast off wasn't one of my better decisions. But they were off from school, the weather was perfect and we thought getting him back on the mountain would be really good for him. He's also mentioned several times this winter he feels bad that he's keeping the family from skiing this year and I wanted to take that off his plate.

I have to give props to his instructor for coming up with an alternative. She got Jake a ski bike which is a bike frame and uses small skis instead of pedals. We were so proud of Jake for being willing to try it after such a huge disappointment with the snowboard. I was feeling awful for rushing him to get back on his snowboard and causing him yet another letdown. He was a little hesitant at first but ended up doing really well. He never got off the magic carpet/bunny hill (for those non-skiers it's the area for brand new skiers), but  he seemed like he was having fun. Here is some video we took http://youtu.be/-OTd826ccCQ. Luke was also a real trooper, we were so proud of him. He was so patient and just kept making short little runs in the learning area. He and Todd did go make one run on the chairlift towards the end of the day. Luke also gave the ski bike a try and was surprised at how hard it was.

While Jake was still bummed he didn't get to snowboard, he ended up having a decent time and the day ended up being salvaged. His instructor said that he has enough control on the bike and we could take it up on the mountain next time.

We were invited to be part of something else really cool this past week that I wanted to share but I'm waiting for the pictures, so that will have to wait until next week. :-)