Skating

We've really been enjoying skating recently, with everybody, except Laurel, on their feet -- well, most of the time anyway!  Yesterday we were at the university rink and everybody had a great time.  We snuck in during the parent and tot / senior time -- hey we have tots, some of them are just bigger than others! -- but nobody seemed to mind.  The boys are all improving and, although they tire quickly, are eager to go back.  

This is Owen's first year on skates, so he has inherited the bob skates.  I love that they fit right over his boots and require no lacing and he loves that he can be on the ice with everyone else with a little bit of extra stability.  It also means that I (or Dada) am not holding him up and dragging him around -- ouch, that gets hard on the back.

Aidan, Mr. I can buckle my skates myself, has improved the most since last year.  He is even confident enough to go off on his own which is a BIG step for him.  He's not much of a sports guy, but seems to really enjoy skating -- maybe he has found his niche (aside from Lego!).

Isaac is in his first pair of lace up skates.  I really need to remember to add lots of extra time for lacing up!  The year that he was in school, they took the kids skating weekly (the rink was next door to the school), so he got a lot of  good practice that year and has continued to improve.  Falling is almost as fun as skating and he is always up for a race!

One of the great things about the university rink is that nobody protests the use of strollers.  How else is Laurel supposed to participate is these activities if not from the comfort of a stroller?  Let's keep practising our walking first, then we'll work on skating.  But we have run into some opposition at our local rink as well as the Oval in Halifax.  The "mobile ice monitors" (my made up job title) stopped us when we were only a quarter of the way around and told us that having a stroller on the ice was too dangerous -- I thought that I was doing a good thing by not carrying her.  Anyway, we were escorted around the rest of the way and that was the end of that.  Here are a couple of pictures from our one lap around the Oval.

 

Oh well, we were getting cold anyway.  So we shared a Beavertail (soooo yummy -- don't think that I've had one since we left Ottawa!), took our skates, and went home.