More skiing!

We took the boys up to Echo Mountain yesterday, a ski area new to everyone in the family. It's a small mountain, only 12 miles out of Evergreen. It's kind of this funny mix of old-time no-frills skiers and the hard-core "dude" snowboard crowd. At this point, the boys only last about 3 hours on the ski hill and we don't need a whole lot of hill for them, so a close, small ski mountain is perfect.

We spent all of our time on the magic carpet - seriously, what an awesome invention for learning to ski! Andrew bought a beginner's ticket (limited to magic carpet and the t-bar) for only $19 & kids 5 & under are free. More mountains need to do this so that people can learn to ski without breaking the bank; if mountains make learning to ski affordable, they'll have people hooked and make money when they have to buy the more expensive tickets for the whole mountain - genius! I didn't buy a ticket yesterday and we found that Andrew probably won't need one next time either; they're very cool about letting you just walk along the magic carpet with your kid and then we just walked/jogged with them as they skied down the hill.

Max is doing awesome with "red light, green light" and mastering stopping with his snowplow and he's getting better at turning. I think we could get one of those harnesses for him and ski behind him soon.

Ben doesn't like to be bothered with snowplowing. He prefers to point his skis straight down the little hill and let 'er rip. At this point, he can get away with this and just crash into us to stop, but we're trying to explain that when he's on a bigger hill, he's going to want to be able to steer and stop. For now though he's having fun.

It's wonderful to hear the laughter and see the smiles coming from both of these bundled-up little masses cruising down the hill!