I'd like to talk about how my family took up skiing this past winter. I KNOW that it's summer, and we only have two months to enjoy the sunshine (if that), but skiing saved my sanity. Literally. We're lucky to live in desert country, and not the prairies, where they have snow six feet high and temperatures that are so cold that they are inhuman. That said, our skies are grey 99% of the time from October through March and we do get snow, and every day without sunshine makes my heart and my mind darker and darker and darker.

I skied a bit as a teenager and my husband had never been on skis, but with our youngest child being five (and thus old enough for lessons), we thought that skiing might be an option to get us through the winter. The kids agreed, and we all signed up for lessons. The first day was tough for them (UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE DECADE), but by the end of that lesson, they all had their balance. By the third day, they had graduated from the bunny hill and were taking the chair lift to the top of the mountain and skiing down. My husband is a natural athlete and surpassed me in skill in about, oh, an hour, but I found my groove. The five of us had a whole lot of fun skiing together for the remainder of the season.

(Except for the lessons we put them into on spring break, where we followed along to "help" and found ourselves going down black diamond runs. That was the opposite of fun.)

People often rule skiing out because it can be expensive, but it doesn't have to be. We bought the majority of our gear at a ski swap in the fall ($15 boots! $25 ski suit! And more!) and cashed in Air Miles to buy lift tickets. We didn't want to buy a seasons pass up front in case the kids hated it, but it turned out that they loved it. Our local hill let us buy seasons passes for the coming 2012/2013 year before last spring break, and if you think of it in the light of a pass being "paid off" after ten ski days, our passed are paid off and we have all of the coming ski season to go. Win!

Do you ski? Did you ski at all growing up? Do you think that skiing is something you'd like to do as a family?