Ski Day

Don't remember if I have mentioned yet that Nathan was actually attending an Emergency Medicine conference in Utah which was the reason for the whole trip. A fellow resident and his family attended as well. Tim & Rose have a 5 year old little girl named Lily- this made the trip so much more fun for Noah. They really hit it off and enjoyed one another's company. Here we are on the way to rent our skis- Noah is holding Lily's hand.


After much adieu, we finally made it to the slopes. ( It takes forever to those ski boots on and then actually get your skis on especially while helping a 4 year old who has no clue what he is doing.) We decided to bypass ski school for Noah, so here is Nathan giving him his first lesson between the gondola and the lift. So far so good.... right?

Well there is no picture to document what happened next. Somehow instead of taking the lift to the green (easiest) slope, we managed to take the lift to the blue (more difficult) slope for our very first attempt to ski with our 4 year old who has only had skis on for about 10 minutes. The lift kept going higher and higher and Nathan & I started wondering aloud if maybe we had taken the wrong lift. We found out soon enough that indeed we had. SO here we are at the top of the slope trying to decide what to do. There is nothing to do besides go down. Now Nathan is a very good skier and had already been skiing on this trip. I, however, consider myself somewhat of a rookie- it had been 6 years since the last time I skied and then I think I skied mostly greens. We had to go down so here's what we did- I took Nathan's ski poles (so now I have a total of 4) and Nathan just picks up Noah under the armpits and holds Noah between his legs and just takes off skiing. It's fairly steep so I work my way down as slowly as I can going side to side while Nathan and Noah stop and wait on me. Repeat this scene over and over and break in a few falls and that is how we managed to get down the mountain. At one point (see picture below) there is a place to switch from the blue to the green so that is what we did. Noah loved it and Nathan did great (I am so proud of him!) but my out of shape muscles were burning fiercely so I decided that was all the skiing I would do.

So after we worked our way down the blue, we ate lunch with our group at the mountaintop cafe. I let Noah ride the Gondola around and around while Nathan skied the rest of the afternoon since we had paid for lift tickets and all. We finally found the bunny slope and I thought I could manage Noah by myself so off we went to give it a try. I was definitely wrong! He did great skiing by himself down the hill- if that is even what you could call it- more of a slight downward incline- but he could not get the hang of holding on to the lift that pulls you back up. I definitely did not have the patience for that mess so we ended up taking our skis off and walking back up- while Noah was crying the whole time. He didn't want to quit but we had no other choice. I decided to call it a day and we went back to the room.