Kicked out tooth

Yesterday Leo fell asleep on the way to our dinner playdate with Madalena. While I was carrying him inside to finish the nap, he jerked and bonked his mouth with his knee really hard. There was a lot of blood in his mouth and we ascertained that it was his baby tooth (and there was adult tooth growing behind it - two rows of teeth, like a shark). He was miserable all night, wouldn't eat anything but soup and mushed avocado for 24 hrs. I felt so guilty and bad. He had more tylenol so he could eat dinner tonight, and with the help of some roasted zucchini, the little bugger came out!

Ski videos

It was Leo's last day of the first session of Eldora Trek Ski School. He passed with flying colors into their green level. Instructor said he progressed the most of the class, which is probably because he started as the worst skier in the class and had to work hard to keep up with the other kids. They did their first blue runs today and Leo loved going fast. Instructor said we'd better watch that love of speed. Instructor really loved hanging out with Leo, said he was very creative and fun which is what the second video is about.

First video is this funny thing that happened all the way down the mountain this morning. They play follow-the-leader, single file and make S-turns all the way down the mountain. Invariably, one kid will fall, and all the kids behind him will run right into him and fall down too. I know Leo has faster ski reflexes than that - I've yelled at him to look out for crossing skiers and had him narrowly turn to avoid someone. But somehow, in this follow-the-leader game, if the leader falls, the rest of the kids just fall too! They did this same thing all the way down the mountain (lineup moved around so it wasn't the same kids always falling). Leo is in blue at the end of this line of 5 kids.

In the next video, Leo and I are skiing by ourselves and Leo's showing me his favorite things on the mountain. We went into Fun Gully. Here he's showing me how he can ski around rocks (although he scrapes right over one to get to them).

Fun Gully

Leo and I went up to Eldora again today. It was a powder day! Which was hard because I could only ski an hour on the frontside before meeting Leo for lunch which he didn't eat. Got in a couple glorious hours on the backside before coming back to the lodge though. Leo was crying when I found him. Apparently he had fallen, lost both his skis and LOST both his skis in the deep powder. And of course, he only had two bites of a sandwich for lunch so he was hungry and tired. He wouldn't let me carry him and he wouldn't take a lollipop. He CRAWLED on his hands and knees 50 feet to the lodge. He then insisted on finding his instructor (there are 100 of them, I think, on weekends) to find out how many runs he'd done. Finally, I thought I might be making headway to carry him to the bus to get to the car and pick up our skis later, when he insisted on doing Fun Gully, which I had promised we'd do a week ago.

Eldora has all these little kids things - a teepee made of logs that you can ski through, a tunnel, and a little gully with animal sculptures in it. So we did Fun Gully, which meant me carrying our gear up a couple hills to the EZ lift. He can do the lift just fine, doesn't even need to slow it down. He seems very comfortable turning, and snow plowing and skiing with his legs parallel although with a very wide stance. I think I could probably take him on a lot of the mountain skiing like that. I followed him into the gully and we skied up and down the sides, sort of like a little half pipe. We had so much fun we did it twice then headed home into a morass of terrible ski traffic and multiple accidents and yuckiness.