One of my favorite quotes of his is:
"Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment."
That saying goes hand in hand with "There are no mistakes, just experiences we learn from..."
Keeping that in mind we'll revisit Jan. 23, 2010. On that bright Saturday morning The Teachers and their advisers loaded up and travelled to Bluewood to learn how to snowboard and earn their snow sports merit badge. The Youngest and 14 other young men (11 of whom had never snowboarded before) headed for the slopes and with short period of instruction were turned loose to hit the ski lift.
First run, he barrels into another boarder. Fortunately the other guy was okay. The Youngest, however, ended up with a spiral fracture of his left humerus.
Quality time has been spent in the ER, at the orthopedic surgeons and getting xrays. And on Feb. 10 we got to go to the hospital operating room, and having a stainless steel plate w/ seven screws inserted in his arm because it had not been healing properly. It will be an ongoing process for him to regain full use of the arm. And some amazing dr/hospital bills have been coming in. Six weeks later we're up to about $25,000 for a broken arm? and still have current billings yet to arrive. I am so in the wrong profession!
If playing the blame game would do any good there are a couple of people who could participate. But the most valuable lesson for The Youngest is that even if you're only 15 there is no time like now to take responsibility for yourself. Blind obedience, peer pressure, the age old "instinct" to follow the herd....all bad ideas if you don't bother to utilize your own brain first. I used to snow ski when I was younger. I remember offering some pretty sound advise before he left the house. All of which he ignored. While I'm not happy with how this went down this is not a "I told you so" post.
I'm just going to keep quoting Will Rogers.
Meanwhile - he has "a really cool" scar to show all his buddies.
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