Ski Pics and a Bennyism

We went skiing on Saturday.  Ben is definitely my son, meaning that he is fearful, anxious, and risk-averse.  So ski progress has been a little slow.  This time we tried out the ski harness, or as Ben calls it the HNL (for Harness 'n Leash).  This keeps him from building up too much speed, and that gave him just the extra bit of confidence he needed -- very soon he was skiing and turning on his own.  When Neil and I were cold and tired and wanted to quit for the day, Ben announced that he never wanted to stop skiing.  Here's a short video -- I'm sorry it's so blurry at the beginning.  And here are cute pictures of Neil and Ben riding on the ski lift and cuddling in the lodge during lunch.

Yesterday, Ben decided to be an archaeologist for a day.  (His primary career goal is to be a librarian at the New York Public Library, because he likes the lions out front.)  He dug up a lot of bones (blocks), reconstructed the skeletons, and then wrote up science reports on them.  Here he is preparing one of the reports.

Here are two of his finished reports.

He put our Company Name (Ben, J Scientists) and logo (a person with an arrow leading to another person, signifying going back in time) at the top of each report.  His inventive spelling is pretty clever -- e.g. "I blev ths slatn is a big wun," for "I believe this skeleton is a big one."  He dictated some of his other observations to me.

Ben has gotten into chess lately.  Okay, so he's a little obsessed.  It all started with the chess board at his piano teacher's house.  These days one of his favorite activities is to try to solve chess problems on the family tablet.  When I picked him up from school today, he was demonstrating various chess moves on the tile floor in the hallway.  Today he noted, "If the game were called check, then we would put the king into chess!"  (That is, ain't it strange that in chess we put the king into check?)