Hunter Mountain Birthday

For my birthday last month we decided to go on a little family ski trip to Hunter Mountain here in NY. We also decided to stay in a slope-side condo. Since our family is now too big for one hotel room, a condo was not much more than booking two hotel rooms and would give us a lot more space for the kids and we could make most of our own meals, saving money on food.

We were really pleased when we got there, to see how nice it was.

I started to tell the kids "This is someone else's house and they are just letting us use it, so we need to be really careful and treat things the way we do at home."
Rick interrupted with "Um, treat it BETTER than you would our house." He had a point!

Renting the condo also gave us access to the nearby Mountain Club pool - but even though it is well heated, it was too freezing and windy to go it, even though they have a little channel you can swim in and out from the building in. Maybe next time.

I took food with us for breakfast the first day, we bought lunch and then after skiing went to the local grocery store for supplies. Nothing fancy (dinner the first night was noodles, mugs of tomato soup and toasted cheese rounds), but things the kids would eat, comfort food, less expensive than eating out and no worrying about waiting ages in a restaurant with tired kids.
The first day we woke up and I could hear the wind howling around outside the windows. I closed my eyes and snuggled further into the blankets, hoping that it sounded worse than it was. It was just as bad as it sounded. It was extremely windy and cold (single digit temps) on the Friday - but at least it wasn't crowded and we just bundled up and went anyway.

The Saturday was much better. Still pretty cold (temps in the teens) but almost no wind and sunny, which made it much more tolerable. We left Jacob and Jane in the day-care and took the big girls both days. You can tell it was cold by the fact that the tip of Emily's nose is the only skin showing.

Emily thought the icicles on the rocks that we could see from the lift were really cool and wanted me to take a picture.

Rick riding the lift with Emily.

Rick riding the lift with bek.

The best part of the whole weekend?
Lots of family together time and bonding - the best birthday gift a Mom could ever get!