Icatar Family Blog

Our Winter Sports season continues with another first:  skiing.  Julianne has skied since she was a kid, but I’ve only gone a couple times.  Annalise has never gone skiing and was excited to give it a try.  We went to Bolton Valley with Julianne’s dad for a day of skiing.  (Isabella and Nathaniel stayed home with Grandma.)  We planned on getting Annalise into a kids group lesson to get her started and I would get a refresher lesson in a group.  This allowed the more experienced Julianne and her dad to get some runs on the more advanced trails.  Honestly, we didn’t know what to expect from Annalise.  She would either absolutely love it or she would get so frustrated that she would never want to ski again.  When we went to get her after her lessons, we were happy to hear that she did very well in her lessons and she was very excited to keep skiing.  At first, she wanted to show off her skills on the beginning hill and was hesitant to go on the ski lift to go on a higher hill, but after a while, she agreed to go up.  Again, she enjoyed herself so much going down the hill that she completely forgot about the beginner hill.  Then, we urged her to go on a higher hill, and although she was hesitant again, she agreed, and had an even better time!  At one point, she was so excited, that she asked when we would get to do the moguls (since she had just seen the women’s moguls event at the Olympics the night before!)  Luckily, Bolton also provides some night skiing as Annalise was not ready to go home.  All in all, we ended up skiing for several hours into the night, and by the time we got home, we were exhausted.  Annalise already can’t wait for the next time we go skiing.

Our next sport?  Curling!

The kids are on their winter vacation and today we took them ice skating for the first time.  I guess watching all the skating on the Olympics got them excited to get out on the ice (although for some reason, neither of them would let me throw them into the air!)  Annalise has previously done some rollerblading, so she took to the ice right away and was zooming around.  Isabella was just as excited to get out on the ice but was a little more cautious as she hasn’t rollerbladed before.  She started out using a walker to help her balance and to get used to the skating motion.  Soon after, she shed the walker and just held one of our hands to keep her balance.  Finally, near the end of the session, she didn’t even need to hold our hands as she was able to skate on her own!  Unfortunately, Nathaniel loved wearing the skates, but refused to touch the ice with them, so one of us had to carry him the whole time.  All in all, it was a great time and the kids are looking forward to hitting the ice again soon!  Check out these pictures and video of our day!

  

Nathaniel has always been interested in the Wii that we got last year.  He wouldn’t actually play the games, but he would pretend by swinging the controllers around.  Just recently though, he started actually playing some of the simpler Wii Sports games and he’s been doing pretty well actually.  He’s even to the point where he can power on the Wii, turn on the TV, and change it to the proper input, and navigate to the game he wants to play!  He’s been gradually getting better and better and he’s actually achieved Pro status in one of his favorite games, the Sword Duel in Wii Sports Resort.  Here are a couple screen shots right after he made the achievement (click to see a larger version), along with a video of him taking care of one of his opponents.  Keep in mind that Nathaniel is just 2 years old!

 

Here are a couple videos to pass the time.

For the third day of our vacation, we contemplated sitting around the pool or hitting another theme park.  We were pretty tired from Animal Kingdom, so a nice relaxing day would have been nice.  But, we also knew that the next day would be New Years Eve and we had a 7am flight back home on New Years Day.  We didn’t decide until Wednesday morning that we would actually do the theme park that day.  We figured that the parks would be really busy on New Years Eve, and we could relax on Thursday so we wouldn’t be too tired for the flight home.

Click the Read More button below to continue, or view the slideshows and videos below.

On Day 2 of our Florida vacation, we went to Disney’s Animal Kingdom.  Tuesday was a little warmer than Monday.  It was still only in the 60s so we brought some long sleeve shirts with us to the park.  Since the Nickelodeon Suites hotel is only a couple miles from the park, it was a quick ride.  We weren’t quite sure what the parks would be like during this holiday week, but we soon found out that a lot of people like to go to Florida during this time of the year.  Once we got to the park, we got a bunch of maps and immediately tried to map out what we wanted to see and in what order.  Check out the slideshow below, or click the Read More button to read about our Animal Kingdom adventure!

Traditionally, whenever we went on vacations we would never get any family shots or pictures where we were all in the picture.  I also didn’t like the idea of lugging around a large tripod, then having to set it up whenever we wanted to take a picture.  However, I recently found an accessory called the Gorilla Pod which is a mini-tripod with flexible legs.  This cool little tripod can be mounted in a variety of positions and angles so that you can get that perfect picture.  On our recent vacation, we attached the Gorilla Pod to the handle on our stroller and we were able to take many pictures where we were all in it!  The Gorilla Pod also has a quick disconnect feature so that when we wanted to take traditional hand-held photos, we could just quickly remove it from the mount and snap the pictures!  If you haven’t seen it, I urge you to check it out!