K-Wiggles' first day of skiing.

K-Wiggles is, in some ways, my most athletic kid. Since the day she was born, she has been kicking and fighting and wiggling her way into amazing shape. Seriously, this three-year-old has a six-pack that would make a young Arnold Schwazenegger jealous! I can remember when she would lie in her crib on her back, raise both her feet straight up into the air, and then slam them back down onto the mattress so hard I thought the crib would collapse. And that was what she did for fun when she was happy -- don't ask what she did when she was mad. Are you starting to understand why this child was swaddled until well past 8 months of age?

Anyway, the funny thing about it is, K-Wiggles has not taken to the snow and sliding sports like I would have imagined. She has a strange tentative streak in her makeup somewhere. When walking on snow and ice, she tends to drop to all fours and crawl really fast. Her first (and only) experience on ice skates involved similar dropping to the ground. And until today, she had no interest whatsoever in going skiing. I think Daddy J put her on skis once, or maybe it was just in the ski boots, and she was so wigged out that we haven't tried it again.

But for some reason, today she wanted to go skiing. Ok, we'll go skiing. So we dropped Miss D off at ski school for her regular Saturday all-day lesson (more on that later, maybe?). K-Wiggles and M-Moo and I went and had a nice breakfast at No Worries Cafe (since the kids had made their own breakfast out of cheese-flavored sun chips while I was lazing in bed this morning!).

Then we ran home to grab our ski clothes. Then up to The Canyons to see if Canyon Mountain Sports (the ski shop there) still had the two pairs of kids' skis that Daddy J had seen but not bought a few weeks ago. Of course they don't, but what they do have is a bunch of pairs of brand new Dora the Explorer kids' skis.

Thankfully, they were having a 30% off sale, and we found some pink bindings that were 60% off and I managed to get out the door for a lot less than I would have thought for two brand-new pairs of kids' skis. We sent the skis off to the shop to have the bindings mounted and rna over to Pizza Hut for a quick lunch.

By the time we finally got up the hill, it was 2:00, and we had to pick up Miss D at ski school at3:15. Well, everyone actually got their skis on. (I won't tell you about how M-Moo apparently made a mad dash down the bunny hill while I was working on K-Wiggles skis, landed in a heap at the bottom of the lift, was helped up by the lifty and a couple of other skiers, and managed to bloody her lip, all while I wasn't looking -- not a good feeling to turn around and "where's M-Moo?").

The girls and I worked it out so that I would have K-Wiggles come down the hill a little ways to me, then get her stationary, and then have M-Moo come down the hill to me. Thankfully I had an edgie-wedgie in my pocket, 'cuz K-Wiggles needed that. She can't shuffle her feet... something about each foot sliding independently and not feeling confident to pick up her feet or shift her balance much. But once the skis start sliding, she's ok. We even worked on getting her to turn the skis to me, and she did it!

All in all, we took one hour and made one run down the beginner hill (me walking in my ski boots -- wish I would have left those home and wore my Sorels... could have left my skis in the locker too). We made it over to the lodge to pick up Miss D and all made it down the gondola safely. I'm sure you can picture in your head the circus that was me with three kids and four pairs of skis trying to load onto and off of the gondola. I'm quite surprised we didn't wind up making our way back up the hill because we couldn't get organized to get off the gondola in time!

Oh, and the best part? K-Wiggles did NOT want to stop. She wanted to do it again and again and again. So hopefully, next week Daddy J will be home and we can do it one-on-one with the littles while Miss D is in ski school.

And finally, Miss D had another great day in ski school. Her coach, Zak, took his group (two or three kids this week, I'm not sure), on Saddleback and they skied some honest-to-goodness Blue terrain. She's "this close" to moving up to the "Blue" team -- just the next level of ski-learning progression.

Everyone was asleep by 5:30 tonight. Now it's 8:30 and I'm going to bed too.

Oh yeah, it was 38 degrees and sunny on the hill this afternoon. Doesn't get any better than that for teaching beginner skiers!

More photo prints

Have I mentioned that I'm excited to have my photo printer up and working (I realigned the print cartridges the other day and that fixed whatever alignment problems I had on that one pring of M-Moo) (I also printed a 40-page text document today -- my other printer is on the fritz -- and it spat that out lickety-split). I find, though, that it adds another layer of complexity (read: learning) to edit my photos in Photoshop for printing. All I've done until now is edit photos for the web; totally different.

But while I was searching for this photo of Miss D that I wanted to edit and print and add to my rogue's gallery, I looked through some of my early Photoshop-edited photos. All I can say is "I've come a long way, baby!" Now I want to go back through all those "learning" photographs and re-edit them to suit my new eye and tastes.

Anyway, here's the photo of Miss-D that I printed. It was from our old point and shoot digital camera, so at 8x10 it's actually not as crisp as I would like. But I loved the expression on her face, so I printed it to hang with the other two (of M-Moo and K-Wiggles) and hopefully tomorrow I will hang them on the dining room wall and take a picture to show you all! (Oh yeah, those who received our holiday cards might recognize the photo as one that I used on the card, re-edited).


I also have three more frames that I want to use on that wall to showcase the kids' art projects. Miss-D did a lovely watercolor today that I think would look fantastic framed. And K-Wiggles's scribble pictures are, well, colorful! M-Moo is in more of a "dark" period, where all her artwork comes out over-saturated and, well, dark. But I still think it will be fun to have the kids hang their artwork in the dining room near the pictures. We'll see how it turns out. I've been indecisive about that wall for the whole 2.5 years that we've lived here, so it will be nice to have something there, anything!

Michael Franti and Spearhead

Today marked the start of the VISA Freestyle International skiing competition at Deer Valley.

And tonight was the first time there's been a concert on Main Street since back in 2003. Back then, it was War, playing for the final America's Opening World Cup concert (though we didn't know it was the last one until after the fact, when Park City Mountain Resort announced that it wouldn't be holding America's Opening anymore).

The concert tonight was Michael Franti and Spearhead. It was a great concert, and not even that cold (last time it was about 2 degrees and windy... Brrrr!). Tonight it was 22 degrees, we got parking right by the concert, and had a really fun time. I hope they'll be doing more concerts on Main Street in the years to come.