Four sit-downs before the first chairlift<\/h2>\n
Our six-year-old sat down in the snow four times between the ski bus and the first chairlift, once on purpose, to find out whether her new trousers would let the cold in. They did not. At the half-past-three pickup the seat of her black Wingon was dry to the touch, while the boy next to her in the ski-school queue had a dark, wet ring running from his knee to the top of his boot.<\/p>\n
Reima builds the Wingon for exactly that kind of day: insulated ski trousers in ReimaTec fabric with a water column above 12,000 mm, every seam sealed, 100 g of Re-Loft Flex insulation and elastic suspenders that clip off when nobody wants them. Thirteen sizes run by body height from 92 to 164 cm, about two to fourteen years. We put two pairs through five autumn ski days on a Tyrolean glacier and one apartment wash: our daughter’s in size 116, her eight-year-old brother’s in 128.<\/p>\n
The price is EUR 129.95 for most colours and EUR 124.95 for a few end-of-line shades, with retailers between EUR 94.99 and 144.99. That is the middle of serious children’s ski wear, well above the supermarket pair and far below the designer labels. The catch arrives in two places, and we met both inside a week: the knees and the seat are where hard play shows first, and the fit changes from one child to the next more than any size chart admits.<\/p>\n
A dry child buys the whole afternoon<\/h2>\n
The expensive failure on a family ski week is rarely cold. It is wet. A child whose trousers soak through at eleven is back in the hotel by twelve, and the ski-school afternoon you paid for is spent in the room with a hairdryer and a sulk. Sitting and kneeling press meltwater into fabric far harder than falling snow ever does, which is why 12,000 mm matters more on the seat of a six-year-old than on any adult jacket, and why sealed seams matter at the crotch, where a plain stitched seam would let the wet straight through.<\/p>\n
Warmth came without bulk. On a morning that started at minus eight at the top station, a merino base layer under the Wingon was all our daughter needed; her brother, who runs hot, skied in thin leggings and never asked to go in. Breathability is rated at 7,000 g\/m\u00b2 over 24 hours or better, which suits the stop-start rhythm of ski school, and at lunch nobody peeled off clammy legs. A teenager skinning uphill would want more.<\/p>\n
The bigger win was independence. The waist is elastic with a velcro adjuster, the suspenders stay put, and the hems open wide enough to slide over ski boots before the inner snow gaiter snaps shut around the boot cuff. Our son dressed himself in the boot room on day two and every morning after, which saved one of us about four minutes and one argument a day, or twenty minutes across the week: a whole warm-up lap with the ski school.<\/p>\n
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Boot room yes, departure gate no<\/h2>\n
On the slope the Wingon behaved the way ski trousers should, which means that by Tuesday we had stopped thinking about it. The black reinforcement at the hems shrugged off the clatter of skis being carried, crossed and dropped on the walk to the lift, and the inner gaiters kept snow out of both pairs of boots through two tumbles into the deep stuff at the edge of the piste. The chairlift benches were crusted with the night’s ice every morning, and nobody arrived at the top with a damp seat. Snowballs were rolled, lobbed and sat on for an hour after lessons, and the trousers came back to the hotel dry inside.<\/p>\n
Ski school is where the suspenders earn their keep, and also where they cost us. They hold the trousers up through a morning of falling over, so no cold strip of back appears when an instructor hauls a child upright by the jacket. The price comes at the mid-station toilet. With a ski jacket zipped to the chin, a six-year-old cannot slide the straps off her own shoulders, so one of us clumped into a crowded washroom in ski boots for a step that took two minutes; the front snap and zip she managed alone. One suspender buckle also crept looser by lunch. By day three she had found her own fix: suspenders off before ski school, velcro tabs pulled one notch tighter.<\/p>\n
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