My father got his three daughters on skis at the early age of three and dragged us out to the icy Vermont slopes rain or shine. I thank him for giving me a sport that gives me an absolute feeling of freedom without the fear. But in this moment in time, as I watched my friend ski down the foreboding ski slope, the fear came on strong.

I had no choice but to follow and as I made the leap my skis caught a twig and I plummeted down into a deep crevasse. I landed at the bottom with my heart racing. I looked way up and saw light and safety above but I was underneath the snow and I was hyperventilating with the fear that if I moved at all the snow would cave in and suffocate me. I wasn’t ready to die, I still had so much more to show and teach my children and I wanted to grow old with Wade.

A voice inside my head shouted, “CALM DOWN.” I listened, knowing that the next few seconds could save or kill me.

I awoke from my dream, my pajamas drenched with sweat and my heart pounding and I heard the message loud and clear.

During Christmas break I have been doing my best to keep the boys busy outside, despite the freezing temperatures, moving them from sled hills to skating rinks to ski slopes packed with boozed infused tourists and crazy locals.

I need to calm my twitch and find my inner calm and we all need a day at home.

This morning I told the boys that I did the dream thing with daddy again last night. I had gotten home late from watching the film, An Education, at the Aspen Film Festival and I woke up Wade so that we could have connection and catch up on our weekends. He had just returned from riding one hundred miles in one day on The White Rim Trail, an intimidating feat. “Wow, where did all this candy come from?”, I asked. “Jillian, your falling asleep on me again”, he laughed waking me up out of my dream. I used to do this to him all the time when we would have late nights together, pre-children.

Brevitt told me that in my Book of Dreams it says that when you are dreaming of candy it means that you want to have sex. I started to ask him what exactly he knew about sex but we agreed that it was to early in the morning for that kind of conversation.

Brevitt has entered his “Tween” years and is teetering on the edge of innocence. As I get a glimpse of his teenage years to come I get more and more worried, especially since he closely resembles yours truly. I watch him lewdly dancing about the house to his crazy music that Wade and I naively turned him on to at an early age and I know that I have a whole lot of work to do before he begins to tune out my words of wisdom. I begin by telling him to tone down his thrusts out of respect for the person that he is dancing with.

So what do you get when you pour Jillian into a boy of this generation who is the oldest in the family instead of the youngest? You get a very sassy, social, highly charged, cheeky pelvic thrusting ten year old with a hot temper.

Luckily he also inherited my father’s good humor and charm and as he does silly things like shoving my ear buds up his nose to see if he can hear the Ipod through his nose, I can’t help but laugh. Parenting can be so monotonous at times and I don’t see any harm in getting on their level to appreciate their humor.

When we were driving home the other day Brevitt saw a patrol sign on the side of the highway that said, “DUI CRACKDOWN” and he asked me why the sign said, “Do I Crackdown”. I found this an appropriate moment to begin the conversation about responsibility.

I know that the conversation could wait a few years but he has not yet become sullen and introverted and so I feel compelled to feed him life’s lessons now before it is to late.

Axel did not like our discussion before he went to sleep. He is socially so different from Brevitt and is quite content hanging with his one best friend and his family. I tried to teach him how to be sympathetic and friendlier to the other children who look up to him and ask for playdates with him daily. He started crying telling me that I couldn’t force him to play with people he didn’t want to. Frustrated and exhausted I didn’t have the energy to play this one out. He is not easy to get back on track once he gets upset.

The next morning he told me about his dream: The two of us were eating lots of chocolate together and I was pregnant with a cake in my stomach. Axel told me that the cake was getting sick from all of the chocolate and something was wrong. The cake baby swooshed out and had an ear for a nose.