Ski Trip

I'm not sure if I have mentioned it previously, but we had a ski trip planned for the end of January and just got back yesterday. My Mom has a house in Deer Valley, Utah that is a rental/investment property, which she is most likely going to need to sell at the end of the ski season. She had wanted us to come skiing with her at the end of January and the beginning of March. I had originally thought I would likely be doing IVF in March, so I had agreed to go in January. When I ended up getting unexpectedly pregnant in December that threw a wrench in my plans. However, I asked my RE and she said it was fine to go skiing in the first trimester -- that she had skied when she was pregnant too. My OB, unfortunately, did not agree. When I saw her last Monday, she said I should not be skiing or doing any other high impact sports. Well, the tickets had already been purchased and this might be the last time I could go to my Mom's house, so I decided to go anyway and just take it easy.

Skiing ended up being more difficult than I expected. The weather was uncharacteristically bad. We planned on skiing three days. The first two days there was freezing rain and fog on the mountain. I'm always a bit nauseous the first day of skiing due to altitude sickness, but altitude sickness + morning sickness + fog was not a good combination for me and I ended up being really nauseous. I still ended up skiing some, but I took a long break after lunch and just sat by the fire with a hot cider, which was also really nice.

The second day, the weather was even worse -- more rain and ice. When we got up to mid-mountain and were already really drenched, my Mom and I decided to have a sit-down breakfast. Y went out and braved the elements, but after an hour, she had really had it. We ended up doing a few runs, but decided it was too miserable and just bailed.

Now, if I had done a little contingency planning or really looked for alternatives to skiing like a should have after my OB told me no skiing, I would have realized that the Sundance Film Festival coincided with our trip. Our course, we figured this out once we got there, but we didn't have tickets on hand or really know how to go about purchasing last minute tickets. After we quit skiing the 2nd day, we checked it out and found out that all showings for the rest of the afternoon were sold out. I wasn't up for waiting 2 hours in the rain to "maybe" get a ticket off the wait list, so we decide to go to a regular movie. We went to see "Revolution Road," which I knew very little about in advance and suffice it to say was a very strange movie to see when you are 10 week pregnant. Still, since we had T, I almost never get to see a movie in the movie theater, so it was fun to be able to see a good movie on the big screen and eat popcorn, even if the subject matter was not really pregnancy friendly.

Now, we thought it might rain again the next day, so we wanted to be better prepared. Sunday was the last day of Sundance and most of the screenings are festival award winners. My Mom and I bought tickets for 3 movies -- Y was still looking to ski even if the weather was not good. Of course, as luck would have it, it snowed over night and was still snowing when we woke up. We decided to go skiing it the morning and then still see the last movie after lunch. We saw "Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire," which won both the Jury and Audience Prizes for US Dramatic Films. This was a really amazing film and we got to see it in the Eccles Theatre, which seats over 1200 and is sort an experience just in itself.

T was in daycare for 3 days while we were skiing and going to movies. T is normally with a Nanny and only goes to daycare occasionally, maybe a few times a year, at Y's work. He would really lay it on think when I would drop him off in the morning -- crying, refusing to walk, and hugging me in the death grip, but by the time we went to pick him up in the afternoon, he would be happy as a clam.

Anyway, overall the trip was a success. My Mom was so happy and appreciative that we came and kept trying to prevent us from paying for anything, which was very sweet. Airplane travel with young children can always be a bit of a challenge, but we did fairly well. T just missed the under 2 year cutoff where the child can travel on your lap and so we had to buy him his own seat, which was more expensive but a lot less painful. It is hard to believe that the next time we go on an airplane we will likely be travelling with 2 kids -- that should be interesting.