Winter Break: Thursday

Day Four of my children's Winter Break included more of our favorite new hobby: Skiing

I have seriously loved having passes to the Dartmouth Skiway and have used them over and over, making it well worth the money spent.  Luckily the children all seem to enjoy doing it as well. 

 I love how Maddie asks me every single morning if it will be a ski day.  If not, she comes up with all sorts of reasons why we should go.  She has been fearless and tough.  She apparently tried a rather large jump at ski lessons a few weeks back, fell and had a bruised/scratched left cheek for several days.  When it happened, she brushed herself off after a few tears and continued to ski the rest of the time without any complaints.  She wasn't scared to immediately try another jump.  Because of her fearlessness, she has rapidly improved and is now going over small jumps and landing them every time.  She is also skiing parallel nearly all the time and has been bothering me excessively about when she will get her own ski poles.  For now, she is content to borrow mine when we are on the bunny hill.

Robby has also grown to like skiing much more than when the season began.  Of all my children, he is the most hesitant to try a new thing.  He also tends to get very frustrated at himself with failure of any kind.  This includes trying new sports/activities and being unsuccessful in the beginning.  This school year, we have been really focusing on him being brave with these new situations and he is gradually improving.  I have been really proud of Robby this year.  Even though he has had frustrating situations on the slopes and grows tired of skiing after a few hours, he has really pushed through and is learning how to ski!  He was especially excited when he learned how to walk sideways up to the small jump by the J Bar.  He figured out that he actually could do this jump and land it. Huge mommy moment right there when he came over to me and told me that he did it. 

Of all of my children, Eli is by the silliest.  Jesse and I joke around that he is our blonde silly little airhead.  He lives in the moment and gets distracted quite easily.  He laughs his way through life for the most part and everything is a joke.  When I first started teaching him to ski, he approached it the same way.  Instead of taking things seriously, he would just laugh at me and do whatever he felt like.  Talk about frustrating when you are trying to teach safety and technique for skiing.  After a particularly frustrating day, I had a brilliant idea.  I started putting him between my skis and holding his arms while we skied together.  I am sure many of you are wondering why I didn't think about this before.  Answer: I don't know.  Nevertheless, it worked.  Another thing I did was to finally get over my irrational fear of using the harness backpack.  For some reason the first time I tried the harness I felt awkward and the straps seemed to tangle up.  When I tried it again, I finally figured out how to hold onto the straps correctly and I learned how to help steer him down the mountain.  This was a revolutionary experience. Because of this I can finally take all the children up the ski lift and slowly make it down the mountain with Eli.  My knees do tend to get a bit sore from snow plowing so much, but at least it allows me to do a bit more skiing than I get on the bunny hill.

I am really looking forward to skiing as a WHOLE family this Saturday!

Robby looks like a total stud in his ski gear

Eli showing off his harness backpack that we use.  He loves wearing his "Ninja ski mask" and it cracks me up how little you can see his face

I finally caught a picture of Miss M with BOTH skis off the ground.  She has been borrowing my poles which are much to big on the little hills.  Thank goodness we finally ordered two pairs of ski poles for our biggies that just came in the mail.

I nearly caught a picture of Robby mid air. But not quite.  Oh well, next time