Christmas at Whistler (part II: playing)

We actually didn't take too many pictures while we were up at Whistler, with no pictures at all of the whole family, the meals, or even really of the adults. But we did get a few pictures of the kids at least! Here you can see all four of them stuffing themselves with food. Poor Toby is a bit younger than the rest, and is stuck off to the side in the high chair. Now that Billie is a little older Claudia and Midori let her play with them, but none of them want to play with Toby. He tries to join in with whatever they're doing and he is rejected again and again. It doesn't seem to get him down though, he just tries again and again...
Here are Claudia and Midori playing on Christmas afternoon before supper. Both of them received a toy play pen for their dolls (I was corrected by Midori - it's actually called a "pack-and-play"), which folds up and fits into this little nylon bag. While they both really liked the pack-and-play, Claudia was really most taken with the nylon bag, which she wore as a backpack pretty well non-stop. She also received this set of 6 little Disney "princess" dolls, consisting of Ariel the mermaid, four interchangeable blondes, and a strawberry blonde (thus representing all facets of feminine beauty), which she put inside the backpack. We were outside playing in the snow, and she had her backpack full of dolls. She wasn't taking them off for anything.
Here's me in my new outfit, a skirt and top from The Smoking Lily, a very neat little shop in Victoria. All of the clothes are made locally, which makes them a bit pricier, but they're lovely and very interesting. The skirt has silhouettes of insects silkscreened along the left side, and the top, made out of sweatshirt material, has computer gobbledy-gook along the back of the collar, the bottom right edge, and one of the cuffs. I love them. I had to go try them on to make sure that they were going to fit before Jeremi bought them (the XL corresponds to a size 12, so it wasn't certain by any means), so I already knew what I was getting. Since there wasn't really any surprise left, he wrapped them so that there was no mystery as to what was inside - the skirt was a flat trapezoid, and the shirt was wrapped flat with sleeves sticking out. I don't think I'm explaining this very well, but it was quite funny. (Alas, we took no picture.) On the tag for the shirt he wrote "3 guesses", and on the tag for the skirt it read "Oh, the suspense". He's a pretty good gift wrapper, not to mention gift buyer. (He also bought me some qiviut fleece for spinning, the soft under-hairs of the musk-ox, which are warmer than wool and softer than cashmere, and on the tag wrote a cryptic crossword clue with the solution "qiviut".)

And of course, since we were in snowy Whistler, you're all wondering if we were skiing. Neither of us is really into downhill skiing. Jeremi has only tried once, I've tried several times and feel confident in saying that I don't enjoy it and don't need to do it again. (I think that having a machine pull you up a hill so you can slide down is a bit pathetic as far as sports go, but that's just me.) But both of us do really enjoy cross-country skiing, so we borrowed some skis from my aunt and uncle and set out on Christmas Eve. We forgot the camera while we were actually out skiing, but here's Jeremi with his south-pole-explorer ice-beard once we made it back to the car.