canadian christmas

ava spent another lovely white christmas with grandma, in thunder bay. ava and grandma headed up to the great white north early, on december 8th, and john and i joined them on christmas eve.

grandma is a very enthusiastic winter sports coach, and she got ava out in the snow several times a day. since the ice skating rinks were not open for the first couple of weeks of ava's visit, the theme of this visit was cross-country skiing! as is traditional, ava's first year on skis was spent without poles. despite this handicap, by the time john and i arrived we were really pretty impressed. she could shuffle along on the flats, understood the principle of making "Vs" to go uphill, and maintained her balance very well on gentle downhills. on boxing day, grandma even talked ava in to participating in a 5-and-under cross-country ski race.

in between ski lessons, ava really enjoyed just playing in the snow this year. we built a snow family and a snow cave, did some sledding and a little skating too.

the only thing we didn't have this christmas was... a camera. due to an unfortunate accident, and some bad quality assurance, we wound up in canada with a busted canon 40D. the few pics we managed with grandma's point-and-click camera are here.