I was first on skis over 30 years ago. I’ve always loved the sport. It’s my father’s sport, and he shared it with his kids. We all took to it, but for me, as the oldest child, it was the most incredible way for me to connect with a man that I’ve always found it very difficult to connect with. My parents divorced when I was very young, and my father moved back to NY and started a new family, and so we didn’t see each other much. As a divorced kid, as I got older, I didn’t want to leave Chicago and my friends to go to NY and live in his home with his other wife and his other kid, for any amount of time. So the weeklong ski trips to Vail became our time.

There was a period of time in there, though, that I started to hate skiing. My father and I have this unspoken competition thing going on, and so it just stopped being fun. We’d be skiing, I’d be enjoying the scenery, the smell of the fresh mountain air and just thinking to myself “life doesn’t get much better than this…” and all the while, he’d be bringing up the rear yelling “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee!” You see how that could get old?

But I’ve always harbored a not-so-secret fantasy of being a ski town local. And now? I am. I love it when dreams come true. I’m thrilled for my girls to grow up on skis with the yummy red cheeks that everyone up here has. But I’m especially grateful that I found a man who has the same desire to build and grow a family in a place like this. As we are sitting here in our new home, surrounded by a never ending mess of cartons begging to be unpacked, I keep having to pinch myself to make sure I’m not going to wake up. Life just can’t get much better than this…

I promise… pictures to come.