Is It Naptime Yet

There is an ice skating rink in town that does a Homeschool Friday for the first Friday of each month. It costs $5 per child to skate, they get a free hot chocolate, and parents get to skate free. I honestly avoided going for the first few times I had heard about it. I had only skated once in my life, on a a date, when I was in high school, over ten years ago.

It’s a funny story.

I had just gotten home from work and there was a knock on my door. Blake, a young man from my new ward, was at the door. My family had just moved in January and I think this was in May or late April 2001, my final year in high school. (I had flirted with him a little on a General Conference trip with our ward that April.) I open the door and he asks, “You wanna get in that there van with me?” (The way he asked was just hilarious.) Apparently, a few of the guys in my ward had decided to plan a group date that Friday while at school, and he had been calling me that afternoon, but I was not home, so they took a chance and appeared on my doorstep. I was still in a skirt from work, so I asked if I could change first, left a note for my parents that I would be out on a date and with whom, and got in the van. We ate Sonic for dinner and went ice skating. I ended up holding his hand the entire time to keep my balance, and the other two couples speculated about it. It was the only date we went on because summer quickly approached, I went to the singles ward, and when he called me that Fall to go out again, I was already engaged to be Mrs. Jonathan Blake.
Moral of the story: Ice skating is an awesome date to go on if the other person has never been. You might get to hold their hand the entire time.

So back to avoiding ice skating. Since I had only been once in my life, I wasn’t really wanting to take the girls. I’m not an athletic person and I have terrible balance. For the March skating day I decided to take the girls since our park group would be there, and I really did not want to skate. Once there I found out the other parents were going skating, and I was really nervous. Tears welled up in my eyes and my friend Laura noticed. She gave me comfort that I could take it easy and use a trainer, which I did. Eden was kinda my cover, since I tagged along with her at first. Eventually I decided it would be not fun skating hunched over, so I made Eden go out on her own a little. It was hard for her at first, but once Eden got the hang of it, she was very pleased with herself. Lilah used the trainer for part of the time, but started using the wall and going out on her own pretty early. At one point her friend Shelby took her hand and they skated together.
Laura also helped me, and held my hand for a few times around the rink to give me confidence.

So ice skating was a big hit in March, but I forgot to take my camera.

So for the skate day in April, we went once more and I brought my camera along. We all did much better, though none of our friends were there this time. Eden even tried skating by herself while holding onto the wall and with my help. Towards the end I took a terrible fall, straight to my knees, and took Eden down with me. I had a huge bruise on my left knee, and even though it’s mostly yellow now and not noticeable, my knee hurts if I put too much weight on it when kneeling or sit Indian style.

I remembered the camera the second time around and took some pictures of my cute ice skaters.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2012 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Family, fun, homeschooling, Kids, Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.