Happy New Year!

I'm back! Sorry about the delay since Christmas. Between seeing friends or family nearly every day between Christmas and New Years and my mom being here for most of the last week, I lost track of my postings, but I'm back now and ready to get a strong start for 2013.

I still plan to catch up with all the older photos from 2012, but I'm going to try and post current photos as soon as possible so as not to get stuck in this hole once again. In that spirit, this first post of 2013 is going to highlight Lucas's first ski lesson of 2013, which we went to at Mt Pakenham this past Sunday.

We put Lucas in the same level of classes as last year since he hasn't been since then, and we figured it might be good to get a refresher. What's new this time around is that Marilu bought skis so she'll be skiing during his lessons and then taking him up some hills afterwards to get some extra practice.

That plan already paid off in this first week as he had a blast skiing with Marilu. During his lesson, they only got a chance to go up the little practice hill a couple of times during the hour due to all the other kids taking lessons. With Marilu, he went on a slightly bigger hill 4-5 times before we had lunch. After lunch, they went a couple of more times, and then much to our surprise, he asked to go up the chair lift to the top. He and Marilu made it all the way down the gentlest run, the Wizard, without too many issues so it looks like he's off to a great start. I think we can change the level of his lesson so that might be something to look into if he gets a lot more experience with Marilu over the next couple of weeks.

You can barely recognize him here as he is completely covered. Probably more than needed since it was a relatively mild day. He ended up taking the balaclava off after lunch. FYI, the color for his lesson group was "berry," and I guess they nicknamed themselves the Purple Ninjas.

On the slopes with Marilu. He fell his first few times going up the towbar, but by the 4th one he had it down pat. He also got much better on the hill, eventually skiing the whole way down without crashing.

Here they are, about to get ready for his first chairlift ride. If he ever becomes an Olympic skiier, I guess we can look back at this picture as where it all started.

Posing for the camera.

Finally, a couple of videos of the two of them on the towbar hill.