Nostalgia Sunday: Falling

I noticed the other day that Snarkymommy hadn't been going through my rotation list meaning that either Amy hadn't been blogging or that her website had changed thus making my feed null and void. I checked out her site, and sure enough it had changed from www. to no www.

As I was catching up on her posts, she had one where her daughter fell down the stairs. And I started laughing. Not because her daughter fell down the stairs, but because it reminded me of my my sister fell down the stairs. And that story is as follows:

My grandparents used to own a cabin in the Colorado mountains. Since they both worked full time jobs, it meant that the only time anyone was at the cabin was MAYBE on the weekends. As such it meant that it was pretty open to having lots of people over when no one else was planning on using it. This usually translated to having extended family over, or my dad would take his coworkers, my parent's marriage encounter group would have a get-away, my uncle's minister friends would have a retreat, etc., etc.

During one of the marriage encounter get aways, someone (and I'm going to blame one of the boys for this), had the brilliant idea of sliding down the stairs on sleeping bags. Still bumpy, but the sleeping bag made it so you continued to slide the whole way. This was shortly upgraded to the twin air mattress. As you can imagine, this was great fun for a bunch of kids to do--toboggan down some carpeted stairs until the wall at the bottom stopped you. The boys and girls were greatly enthralled with this while the adults were all sitting outside on the deck and communing with nature or some shit.

After a while, it became boring to sit on the air mattress and go down the stairs (luge style), and shortly one of the boys decided to go head first (skeleton style). At some point, I started going down head first (great fun!), and started trying to talk my sister into doing it because it was SO much more fun than going down on your butt. She finally agreed to go head first, but only if I went with her at the same time. Since we were both like 5 or 6, it wasn't difficult to fit on a twin mattress. And so we prepped at the top of the stairs, hanging over the edge, getting ready to go. When I gave the word, the boys pushed and Dani and I started down the stairs.

I remember going down a couple of steps and feeling like something caught so I put my hands out and stopped us completely.

Only Dani didn't do the same thing.

Dani slid off the front of the air mattress and then tumbled down the rest of the stairs.

Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. All the way to the bottom where she probably landed on her head and her butt hit the log wall.

HiLARious. At least to the rest of us kids.

[aside] Kinda like the time when Shawn and I went backpacking and he twisted his ankle and fell down right after I told him not to twist his ankle, and so I could not stop laughing. [\aside]

We were told, in short order, to stop going down the stairs like that because someone was going to get seriously hurt. So instead we went outside to play with the bows and arrows my grandpa had made for us from aspen seedlings...much safer, I'm sure.