Raised by wolves in the locker room...

I have to say that I am really grateful for a friend of mine. Every time that I'm worried that I won't make it, or that I'm not a traditional mom, or that this is hard and I expect a lot out of my kids, I think about that my friend and her sister came out just fine.

They were raised in ski school, ran rampant in the locker room, and grew up in the trailer park. Granted, it was a trailer park in Aspen, and those are really nice places to live, but you get my point. Her mom was a single mother, raising two kids. And these girls did just fine.

Today, Ethan and Bodhi were rockstars. They got up, ate pancakes, dressed for skiing while we watched Matchstick Productions' "The Claim" to get stoked for a nice powder day. I dropped them off at Aspen Mountain at the Max the Moose bus, and they headed to Buttermilk for a day of skiing. They carry their own gear, they know that they need money, ticket, release, helmet, goggles, gloves, all that.

I headed out to teach, and spent the day skiing fresh pow with a really nice family. I finished up early and had some time to catch up on paperwork, scheduling and phone calls, and then the kids got dropped off. We took their skis into the tuning room and the boys got to work.

Two hours later, the skis were tuned, waxed, brushed and ready to go!  We decided to walk over to Stapelton Sports to watch real tuners doing a great job by hand, and Bodhi and Ethan pestered them with questions for a while.

We headed home to find Andrew ready to play in the deep snow, so the boys and my sister Liat spent the night jumping off the roof. Andrew pulled off his first dryland backflip! It was awesome!

The boys jumped in the bath, Ethan laid on my heating pad for a while, and we read some Harry Potter. They fell asleep in about five seconds, and I'm at my desk plowing through emails and scheduling, a huge pile of clean laundry behind me.

My happy sister just walked in from a successful and fun hot tub poach, and all is right with the world!!

Andrew in mid air: first back-flip on land! WOW!