Making memories is worth the work

I should have known that a 3-year-old and figure skates would turn out to be a lethal combination.

But in my idealistic mommy mind, I thought, "How fun to take Nicole ice skating for the first time. What a great memory for her." Now I know all you wiser mothers out there are shaking your heads at my naivete — because you, too, once tried to jam a wobbly toddler foot into a rigid figure skating shoe for no other reason than you had already paid for it and you were at least going to do one lap around the ice before taking a picture to prove you did it and go home.

Needless to say, it wasn't quite the scrapbook-perfect memory I had envisioned of Nicole gliding along the ice while she held hands with her daddy and mommy. There was a lot more "Ouch it hurts. It doesn't fit. I want to go home" and a lot less, "Oh Mother, thank you for this wonderful experience."

It felt odd being on the other side of this exchange because I grew up being the ultimate complainer while my parents forced life experiences on me.

Every winter, we went through the same process. My dad and mom would take my two sisters and me on a ski vacation. This would entail my parents getting us up at 6 a.m. to put on — cue ominous music here — long underwear.

Getting three kids to put on itchy, scratchy, tight long underwear at 6 a.m. is more or less asking for an epic meltdown. The morning usually ended with me in a heap on the floor, crying about the itchiness, while declaring my undying hatred for skiing.

Then, once we got to the slopes at about noon, my dad had to put on all of our snow boots for us because we couldn't get them tight enough. He also had to carry all of our skis, straighten our socks so the toe line wasn't "ouchy" and pull our gloves on just right so there wasn't a gap between the sleeve and the glove. Not that we were high maintenance or anything.

After all that, my dad got about five minutes of actual skiing in before our toes were cold, our poles were tripping us or we wanted to just give up because we crashed.

A true glutton for punishment, my dad also insisted on taking us snorkeling every summer. While there was no long underwear this time, there were swimming masks that constantly fogged up and could only be cleaned just right by dad's special spit shine. Oh, and don't forget about the mounds of sunscreen applied on a strict schedule by my mom and the daily excavation of sand that followed us home in our bathing suits, flippers and snorkels.