This past weekend, Elizabeth was gone to Seattle for 4 days, so I invited my folks out to help watch Eliana. One of those days, we headed up to Bridger again. I commissioned my dad to take pictures while we skied. Thanks, Dad!
(I'm including this just to freak out Mommom. Please observe the grip Ellie has on the bar.)
I really don't know how to teach a kid how to ski other than to take her to the top and tell her to point her skis down the hill. That's pretty much what we've done both times.
Ellie did pretty well, but she refused to snow plow. She was all about the going parallel down the hill and then screaming out for me to stop her when she felt uncomfortable. She really hasn't gotten the hang of turning yet, either. On the first few runs on the second day, she'd just spin around until she was going backwards and then she's do an excellent reverse snowplow to come to a stop. She told me she needed new skis that would go straight. It looked to me like the rental shop might've given her longer skis than she had on her first day up, so we went back to check. They said we had the shortest skis they carried, so we headed to the lodge's deck for some sun, food, and hot chocolate. Afterward, things went better. Ellie's favorite part of skiing so far has been the hula hoop set up on the bunny slope for kids to duck under.
(Pay no attention to the magically appearing goggles in the third frame. I'm sure those events occurred in exactly the sequence they're presented.)
While we were skiing, Ellie kept wanting to find some way to exert independence. She seemed to decide that the lift was the place to do it, so we routinely would have disagreements as we were trying to load the chair because she did not want to ride on the same chair. She wanted to ride it by herself. I laughingly mentioned that to the lifty, who told me that they'd let a kid ride by herself if the parent approved. I didn't see that coming.
What was particularly funny to me is that Ellie seems really old and tall compared to most of the kids on the bunny slope. Bozeman is such a ski crazy town that most of the kids Ellie's age are out there skiing by themselves, ripping it up. You basically can't find kids Ellie's age on the bunny slope unless they drop by to practice skiing backwards or to ski with their younger siblings.
This is a much more typical sample of what you'll find on the bunny slope at Bridger.
See, one of the great things about Bozeman is that I look distinctly non-crazy (in comparison) for teaching my 3.5 year old to ski. I could have been this guy:
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