At various point over the last few years, I have idly thought that SteelyKid might enjoy skiing, but we’ve had some winters with depressingly little snow recently, and I’ve never really gotten it together to get her out there. My parents were spending the MLK day weekend at Lapland Lake though, and Kate was going to Arisia in Boston, so I jumped at the chance to take the kids up to the fringes of the north country with adult back-up.

I arrived as the kids were getting a ski lesson from Pat, one of the instructors there, who was amazingly good with kids. SteelyKid took right to skiing, as she does almost anything involving physical activity– she’s an amazingly good natural athlete, which is a continual source of puzzlement for me and Kate. Neither of us ever had anything close to SteelyKid’s sense of balance and ability to pick up the moves for some new sport or game. The Pip had a harder time with it, which the instructors later commented may have had something to do with a bad set of ski boots.

Anyway, after a near-catastrophe when I accidentally took SteelyKid on a trail with a way-too-big hill on it, she was all about the skiing, playing broomball on skis in the “Reindeer Rally” that afternoon, and the next morning she dragged me and my dad out bright and early to ski a mile or so out to the lake (seen in the “featured image” above, and repeated below) and back. I shot this on the way back:

This was the third time she’d ever put skis on. Like I said, she took right to it… I was on skis for the first time in at least 25 years, and thus somewhat less graceful than she was, but it was a good deal of fun.

The Pip wasn’t as fired up about skiing as his big sister, though he did do a couple of lessons. He had a grand time on the tubing hill, trying to see how close he could come to riding his plastic sled into the creek (which wasn’t terrifying at all, nope). He was also quite content to lounge around the cabin and read books:

(The specific book he’s reading in that shot is The Stone Heart by Faith Erin Hicks (which is excellent, by the way). This was one of SteelyKid’s Christmas presents, but the Little Dude has gotten all fired up about reading, and powered through both volumes of the series that weekend.)

Anyway, it was a really good time, and SteelyKid has been occasionally agitating to go back. They got a few inches of fresh snow this week, so we’re going to make the run up there for the afternoon, and see how that goes…