"I think I need to tighten my pants"

(I'll explain the title in a second, I promise.) So yes, kids are a little stressful to teach. But they are in fact kids and spending seven hours a day with a group of kids is going to put you in some strange situations, there's just no way around it. Fortunately, the situations I've been in have been pretty mild so far.

Yesterday, for example, my class (two 12 year old sisters and an 8 year old boy) just got off the chairlift. As I'm talking to the girls about what we're going to do next the boy says (from behind me), "I think I need to tighten my pants." Confused, I turned around to see the kid's pants undone and unzipped, barely hanging around his butt. I have no idea how he pulled this off, we were sitting next to each other on the chairlift not even 10 seconds earlier and everything seemed to be in order then. But there's really nothing to be done but head over and help him pull his pants back on and button everything back up (I didn't want him to take his gloves off -- glove removal and reapplication can be a surprisingly time consuming task -- so I got the pleasant duty of buttoning everything up).

Aside from helping keep clothing on, I've helped kids with all sorts of interesting tasks that I wasn't informed that I'd be doing before I accepted the job. But my hat goes to fellow snowboarding instructor Matt, who's had the best (and worst) experience so far. At the end of the day of the day a couple of weeks ago he's talking with a parent, who's trying to figure out where her two daughters are.

"Well," he starts off, "something at lunch must have disagreed with Julia, she says she's not feeling very well."
"Oh no," replied the mom, "how is she doing?"
"Right now she's downstairs in the bathroom throwing up."
"I'll head down there right now, where's my other daughter, Leslie?" the mom asked.
"Actually, she's in the stall next to Julia. She was going to the bathroom and kind of went on herself instead. I haven't been able to talk her out of the stall yet."
"Oh, that must be disappointing for her," exclaimed the mom.

Two points here. First of all, the mom took everything way too calmly, the "that must be disappointing" line especially threw me off. Obviously I didn't know the entire story (although I wasn't all that interested in learning more). Secondly, I don't know the exact details how Matt's afternoon went, but the look on his face told me more than I needed to know. I can thankfully say that as a snowboard instructor I haven't yet spent any time in the women's bathroom. That is definitely a good thing.