This is kinda tough.
I'm not sure what's going on.
I am trying to figure out what it the right thing to do, and what is the right thing not to do.
***
Sledding was very fun, and no one was injured. I was the oldest person actually sledding, and not just escorting their children. I'm glad. Riding on the same sled as your child is something you don't get to do every single winter forever.
My first run down, though, I hit some kind of snag and the sled and me flipped up and over, and I jammed my knee into the ground. I was like, "oh boy, this might be kinda rough," but was glad it wasn't any worse. A few times later, I went down and thought sure I was not going to miss this tree - that I would be able to lean out of the way, but I wasn't, and I bailed out as I hit the tree - I guess I stayed relaxed enough that it did not jack me all up when my shin went into the trunk of the thing sideways. Lol, the older boychild at the top thought it might be kind of serious, I guess, yelling down, right away, "dad, are you alright!?"
Again, I was glad I was, and after that things went off pretty much without incident.
On a run with the younger boy, we managed to hit the higher ramp someone had added to one of the hills, sending us totally airborne.
This was on a golf course, so there was a small lake, frozen over. You could see that it was a lake from the cattails and flat surface. One of the boys walking with me spotted a snowboard in it, not too far from shore. I went out there, and the ice was still pretty thick, and the footstraps of the snowboard were embedded in the ice. I ran back to where I'd seen some sticks lying on the ground, retrieved these and returned to the snowboard. In the process of hacking at the ice around the snowboard straps, I knocked a hole through the ice to the water below. While looking for something harder than wooden sticks, I found the metal sign with the name of the lake, red worm lake. Both boys laid down on the ice and drank water from the hole.
We managed to free the snowboard, and I gave it to the older son. Of the three boys trying to snowboard, he made the best run, down two hills and off the third in the air.
I did not try the snowboard, figuring I was doing good at that point.
It was fun. There was the bonus that this was something I said (i.e. promised) we'd do earlier in the week. It is good, so good, to try to keep promises, whenever at all possible. Which is why it's so important to be as positive and as dedicated as you can possibly be to something before you promise anything.
Both the boys are so handsome. So perfect.
***
I miss her. I miss her already, so much - and I don't even know if she's even gone or not.
I definitely do.
Ah, baby.
***
It's amazing, how fucking full you can be with everything else in your life, and yet, no matter how well you recognize that, how much weight you give to those things, like sledding with your children, that it's absolutely impossible to discount maybe the only other person and thing really important to you.
You can swallow it back, and push it back. And sometimes, you can even do a pretty decent job of that. But the fact you have to do that, swallow it back, push it back, no matter how temporarily or permanently successful you are at it, only proves its importance.