Big Saturday!

When I look back on yesterday, well, I don't feel so bad that our tree isn't up, no cookies are made, and half our Christmas cards still need to bet addressed. Because our lives these last few weeks have been crazy. Fabulous, fun, and really really hectic.

Here's our Saturday in summary:

Outing 1: The first Nordic race of the year!

Ben and I braved the cold and had a darn fine time at Saturday's classic race in Park City. We were proud finishers :)

Outing 2: Time to decorate the church!

Every year we decorate the church with hundreds of poinsettias. It's our main fundraiser for our annual orphanage work trip to Mexico and a wonderful chance to increase awareness of the trip, make the auditorium look super festive, and raise a bunch of money for Hogar de Amor.

Outing 3: Company Party!

This year the theme of the Qualtrics holiday party was Masquerade and Steve and I went all out with our outfits. We had a blast and looked darn fine doing it! Black tie events sure are fun... once a year.

Thank goodness I'm off all next week because I've got a whole lot of Christmas to get ready for!

WanYing's First Biathlon

A few weeks ago, WanYing, Sasha, Ben, and the whole Sundance Nordic Team went up to Soldier Hollow for a biathlon clinic. Soldier Hollow was the Nordic venue for the 2002 Winter Olympics, so they have a full biathlon stadium and invested in a very cool set of specialized pellet guns for training.

Here's WanYing to tell you about her experience:

What a biathlon is you get to shoot a gun after they tell you about how to shoot a gun. And then you get to shoot a gun, a real life gun, and then you take a lap around a loop on cross country skis then you get to shoot. I think you do that three times and then it ends.

You can't be in front of the gun or else if you hit it in the right spot you can die.

I was with my whole cross country team and lots of other people were there.

The best part was shooting. It was hard. But Ben said if I got a target I could get a dollar from him. But I didn't get a target - but I was really close to getting one!

The hardest part was aiming cause you have to look through a little hole and get the dot lined up with the gun and then shoot it.

I want to do it again!

WanYing's face of fierce concentration

Sasha takes a loop with the deer!

Ben explains about Nordic skiing and how unfair his mean mom is

(Article by Ben, Title and Captions by Mom)

this is ben i'm going to explain why i'm writing on the blog (because its usually my mom writing and someone somewhere might be confused) so basically the resin is that well i hmmm suck at writing so i'm going to be doing one of these a week until i don't suck at writing witch may never happen so i'm just getting practice unless i have a writing project due in school then i wont make one of these so i can focus on that

scales

anyway now that thats out of the way i would like to talk about what the difference between the two forms of cross country classic and skate now lets start with classic it has a binding where only your toe is secure and the rest of your foot is free to move there are fish scale like spots  that are in the middle where your feet are on top of so that you cant move backwards as easily but you can move foreword

Ben skate skiing

the point of this is so you can push off and then slide the difference between skate and classic is that skate dosen't so you use your eages to go and its harder to go uphill but way easy to go on flat areas due to less fiction you can slide way better so yea thats the difrance

Mean Mom skate skiing (only marginally related to the post but kind of a cute photo so a pity not to include)

Ben and Mom Nordic Racing

hi this is Ben writing this(i assume since you are reading this family blog post that you know who i am) i did a race up at mountain dell (me and my mom had a little wager we would divide our time by the number of ks in the race we did aka kilometer but that is a moth full so i will just say ks and the person with the smallest ratio of time to ks wins 5 dollars from the other)it was not a short race well the race was the same length as all my other races but it turned out i was still a wee bit sick i was sick the week before however i was according to me "fine" and also "recovered" but surprise surprise it turned out i only thought that i had recovered and buy the top of the first hill all of my "boundless energy" was gone. over to mom.

Jamie: As I was racing in the novice category, I was in the last group to start. That means that we started right behind the 70+ category (Nordic skiers age well!). Determined not to be outdone by 70-year-olds, I started strong and worked up a good sweat going up the initial hill only to see the little old ladies zipping by me on the downhill. It turns out that if you're racing on your 15-year-old backcountry cross country skis, you should really consider waxing them before the race.

Ben: so in by middle i was very annoyed seeing as every time i started going to the finish the core turned agin so i was going away from the finish arrrrrrrg why i was done after like the tenth of those such turns(i don't know how long it actually was it felt like that though) i wasn't going very fast at all but i was very determined so i did actually end in me beating my mom and getting 5$ so thats a good thing for me at least but on the next race my mom so... tune in nest week for another exciting episode of cross country ski race betting

Jamie: Yeah, so I ended up totally not being able to keep up with the 70-year-olds, but I did finish the race and with a smile on my face, so we'll consider that a victory. I echo Ben's frustration that the seemingly neverending series of loops toward and then away from the finish were a lot of mental anguish for this first-timer to take ("Home stretch" "Wait - why are the people in front of me turning away from the finish?" "Noooo it's another 1 k loop before I finish!") but I was glad for the experience. Next time I'll wax my skis, lose 20 pounds before the race, and totally win $5 off my 12-year-old kid.

Snow Days

Utah is having the best December we can remember, and we are trying to enjoy every last flake! In the last week, Sundance got over 50" of snow - boy did the girls freak out when we held up a measuring tape to show them that the snow is taller than they are!

Here are some recent pics of us out and about in our winter wonderland.

Chorney loves our winter romps, although she does get a little frustrated with the snow clumping between her doggie toes. I ordered some snow booties for her today, much to the boys' chagrin. It will be an interesting experiment... I am betting she hates them at first but then once she starts romping she'll forget they're even on. We shall see.

In celebration of all our snow, we knew we had to get some new skis, so the Morningstar ladies are proud owners of four, count 'em four, new pairs of skis.

Steve talked me into trying alpine skiing again, so here's WanYing showing off her new powder twin tips alongside my alpine boards. I have to say that this new generation of alpine carvers is total ski cheating - I have never made turns so easily! It feels a little cheap not to have the quad-burning of telemark, but it sure is a lot faster and I have four very fast little skiers to keep up with now.

But to those of you who are worried I have sold out entirely, I transferred my favorite telemark bindings over to new powder skis. And with all this snow, I've had ample chance to enjoy them! Here's a very happy me and Sasha showing off our new powder skis.

Trust me, we both rip.

Chorney and I are enjoying our winter commute into work. My short 2 1/2 mile commute is just the perfect distance for her and she keeps up a steady 10-12 mph so she arrives at work with most of her wiggles worked out.

I think she looks very fancy with her Safety Dog vest on.

Here's my trusty pooch and trusty steed in front of the Qualtrics field. The Civia is doing awesome and the belt drive, studded tires, and bar mitts keep us rolling all season long.

And I know this isn't winter-related, but the boys, Steve, and I did go to a midnight showing of Star Wars. It was a ton of fun and we all loved the movie, right up to the point where the 3D was too much for me and I tossed my popcorn. Sigh. My poor brain just can't handle 3D movies. Never fear, I made it out of the theater first and watched the remainder of the movie from the wings.

My family didn't actually leave the movie to make sure I was still alive, but Steve did pause to text me, which is an awfully generous division of attention given that it was the opening night of Star Wars.

Ben competed in his first nordic race of the year up at Soldier Hollow last week. He's in the U14 age group this year, which means that he races a 3 km loop. He finished strong and reported that had a good time talking with another kid as they raced. The competitive mom in me wanted to suggest that perhaps chatting during a race implied that he could have been working a little harder, but I wisely bit my tongue and rejoiced that he had a good time.

Hup hup hup!

He might have gotten a little warm with all that skiing

We've enjoyed a marvelous start to the winter and couldn't be more grateful for all of our snow and free time to enjoy it!

Ying's First Ski at a Race

By WanYing

On Saturday I cross country skied and we were racing. Me and my sister are on the same team and it is the Sundance team. I practice. We have practice and sometimes we have new people coming and we just ski up a little hill and then down. I like practice because sometimes we get to go around the loop. It's fun because we get to cross country ski more than just cross country skiing up and then down again.

The race was great. The race was like you went around a teeny little loop. It was not very hard. I skied fast.

We started at the same time. The start went by ages.

I was just starting the race

My sister's finishing the race

And that's me finishing the race

We winned medals because we went so fast!

My sister's wearing my mom's glasses because it's too bright for her.

We were excited that we got medals and my sister was in place number two. And I was in the place number three.

Sometime I want to do all the races! I like racing.

3 Days, 5 Snowsports

In the past 3 days of Christmassy wonder we have managed to cram in 5 different snow sports. It's a Merry Christmas indeed!

Day 1: Christmas Day

Alpine and Telemark skiing - our Christmas tradition


Day 2: Boxing Day

More alpine skiing with the Sundance Ski Team and Nordic skiing up at the Sundance Nordic Center.

Sasha was approved to use poles at her next team practice - she is so excited!

Grammy and WanYing gear up and enjoy the Nordic Center. And the good folks at the Sundance Nordic Center kept WanYing's adaptive poles all ready for her!

WanYing would have gladly skied more, but after the first mile it was time to go adult-speed so WanYing kindly agreed to hop in the pulk.

Day 3: The day after Boxing Day (does 12/27 have a name?)

Snowshoeing and sliding snowshoeing at the Sundance Nordic Center.

For the uninitiated (don't feel bad, very few people have heard of sliding snowshoes - they're kind of a niche thing for people who need an excuse to buy more winter gear), sliding snowshoes are relatively short (130 cm) wide skis with a snowshoe binding, a metal edge up the middle half of the ski, and scales on the base for grip when going uphill.

There's nobody who really needs snowshoes, cross country skis, and sliding snowshoes, so clearly they were a must-have for our arsenal and I purchased them for Steve last Valentine's Day. The snow was fluffy enough today that he decided to pull them out and we had a blast (that is, he fell down a lot and I laughed from the secure post of my snowshoes. I tried to laugh quietly and when that failed made sure I was out of pole-stabbing distance).

But Steve definitely had the last laugh once we got up the hill and he got to make graceful tele turns down while I ran down the trail behind him and mostly succeeded in not tripping headlong into the snow.

So there you go, 5 snowsports in 3 days - alpine skiing, telemark skiing, Nordic skiing, snowshoeing, and sliding snowshoeing!

So grateful for our adventurous family, for Utah's natural beauty, for snow, and for time together to enjoy it all!

Racing Through February

Oh my goodness, Feburary is just racing by!  I know, I know, a ski vacation, a yurt adventure, Lunar New Year, 2 birthdays, and Sasha's 5-year Morningstar Anniversary make a crazy month an inevitability.  If we're going to be this busy, at least we're having a great time doing it!

This month we've spent plenty of time enjoying the Utah snow (even when there wasn't much Utah snow to be found!).  We finished up the Nordic race season with a freestyle race at Soldier Hollow.  It was Ben's first skate race and Sasha's second race ever, so they were both pretty excited to hit the snow.

This was Ben's first year on skate skis and he's taken to them well.  He really likes the speed of skate, although he admits that it's a lot more tiring than classic. Mom and Dad say that's a good thing since Ben has more than enough energy to burn!

Ben comes in to the finish after his 2K loop

Sasha ready to start!

Sasha coming in after her 1K loop

February also brought more downhill racing for Ben on the Sundance Downhill Team.  This week Sundance hosted a Youth Ski League (YSL) race for kids under 12 from all over the state.

As you can see, Ben totally had his game face on.

The race was a lot of low-key fun with 140 kids participating - that is a lot of little torpedoes rocketing down the hill as they "warmed up" before the race.

WanYing waits patiently for her brother to race (iPhones help with patience)

Here comes Ben looking all Ted Ligety cool

Dad had the brilliant idea (or perhaps made the strategic error, the jury's still out on that one) of giving Ben 5 minutes of play time for each gate he hit on the way down.  The idea was to give Ben incentive to get close to the gates rather than swinging his turns wide.  In practice we think he just went slower so he was sure he could whack each gate with his pole as he went by. The first thing he told me after the race was, "I hit all the gates!  That's 46 gates!" so for better or for worse the incentive worked.  Ah, well, at least he was proud of himself and stayed reasonably tight on course.

Our final February racing adventure was an afternoon spent at Soldier Hollow.

First we did a few kilometers of cross country skiing with WanYing looking uber cool (I asked her to make a movie star face and this is what she offered!) and Sasha skiing like a champ on some pretty tough terrain.  That gal has grit, I tell you!

And after our cross-country adventures at Soldier Hollow we hit the tubing hill for some real racing! CenterPoint Church rented out the whole facility and we spent a fantastic afternoon tubing with our church family.  Nothing beats sledding with 300 of your closest friends and a rope tow to carry you and your tube up the hill.

So, there you have it, all of the Morningstars' adventures racing through February.  I would like to say that March will be a little slower paced but who are we kidding?