Skiing with Kids |

My name is Lila Berg and I am a proud wife to Ryan, mother to Mavis and teacher to many! I love my job as an educator and my new role as “mom” the absolute most. Spending time together with our little family brings me a lot of joy and teaching our daughter to love being active and outside is one of our main goals as parents.

My husband and I love to travel. A lot. We also love to ski. It only seemed natural to us to want to share these experiences with our daughter Mavis. Mavis is now 19 months old and is moving around like crazy and the anticipated first ski day had arrived. We finally got to take her on a ski trip where she was able to hit the slopes for the first time. Teaching our toddler to ski was more fun and successful than we ever could have anticipated and we’re happy we took the advice of many BTBA mamas- when they can walk, they can ski!

Here’s a few things we did that made our first time out awesome, and a few things we might do differently next time.

Skiing with Kids : Hitting the slopes with a 1 year old.

Prepare them for the first time out.

We casually talked to our daughter about what we were going to do before, during and after the ski experience. We told her that she would wear boots that would feel a bit funny and put on skis that would make her go really fast down the hill with mom. It’s amazing how much she seemed to understand just by simply explaining what we were doing. Maybe this one is a no brainer, but in our opinion, this is the most important thing to do!

Rent gear.

We had no clue if she would hate skiing from start to finish or fall in love with the feeling. We liked that we did not have to make a huge monetary investment for her first time trying to ski. It made us stay really relaxed which helped her experience!

Go on a cheap day.

On Fridays at Snow Valley in Edmonton, Alberta it’s only $5 for a toddler lift pass and $10 for an adult. Adults can also get a walking pass that is free. Rentals cost $15 a person and you need a Food Bank donation/person. It was wildly busy on the Friday, but it was ok for our first time out. We had no idea if she was going to like it or hate it, so just trying it out was the right move for us.

Make sure to check your local hill because there are often cheaper days or deals for parents and kids that are sticking to the bunny hills.

Give yourself lots of time.

Since it was so busy, it took about an hour from getting there for us to start skiing on the hill. This was fine for us! We gave ourselves lots of time and set our expectations really low. We were happy just to get in some runs and were surprised that we managed to do 6 runs in about 1.5 hours.

Enlist more hands.

I loved that my husband and I both took our toddler skiing for the first time. You don’t need two people per child but it made us so much more relaxed. I was the one that skied with our little gal and my husband got her ready, grabbed the snacks, took videos etc. All he had to do was get a free “walking pass” ,which allowed him to help me get her through the lineup to the magic carpet.

Bring snacks.

We took a short 10 minute break about 15 minutes before finishing up to have some snacks. It was a great break for the little gal (and mom! #bunsonfire).

Next time we might:

Bring everything in from the car right from the start. We didn’t know what to expect so we just went in on our own without my gear. Next time we would bring all the gear to speed up the process of sorting out the rentals. If it is snowy from the car to the ski hill then we could also bring a sled to haul all the gear.

Be totally ready ourselves (ski pants on etc) while waiting to receive our rentals. Then all we would have to do is dress her in the gear and head outside to ski. It was important that we kept her in her base layers instead of all her snow gear while we waited so she didn’t overheat.

Go skiing altogether! Now that we’ve worked out the first time kinks, we can’t wait to try it out altogether as a family.