Driving Lessons in Snow

The snow started coming around 1:45 in the afternoon on President's Day, a few hours earlier than forecast, which augured for a heavy storm to begin. By evening, there was a good inch-and-a-half to two inches of very powdery snow outside, which (I thought) was the perfect chance to let David learn a little about driving in the snow.

We spent an hour in it, mostly between a church parking lot and the high school's parking lot. Some takeaways from our playtime:

• It's a lot harder today to make a car skid than it was when I was learning, when we didn't have ABS and TRAC systems and multiple redundancies and so forth. The Mom-Mobile will only let you turn off so much.
• Plus, fresh tires this fall, and dry, powdery snow (instead of slick wet stuff) doesn't help.
• Despite that, we did get to give him a few experiences. He fishtailed a bit in each parking lot, seeing how the van tried to slide away from him. He also got to feel the shuddering of the ABS system multiple times.
• We went through a fun little slalom at the high school parking lot, and he got to experience how much l-o-n-g-e-r it takes to stop when sliding on the snow.
• He's such a careful driver at this point, it makes me proud. He resolutely kept well below the speed limits on Silverbrook, in an abundance of caution in the new conditions. He didn't really go wild in the parking lots, either--no actual donuts--but still had the chance to see what the various conditions could be like.