Family Skating

Just before Christmas my kids got to go ice skating for the first time. Some friends also got to go at the same time. After the first difficulites of learning how to move around on ice, and let go of the wall, the kids were soon moving confidently around the oval skating path. At first I was hesitant to go out on the ice myself. I hadn't been on ice since college days. But the kids needed me, so I got some skates and started out myself, a little fearful of how a fall would feel to my now older body.
But it wasn't long until I was helping kids around the rink. My kids were surprised that I could skate. I can't do anything fancy, but I can move around and didn't fall down once that day. They were really surprised to learned that I had learned to skate on frozen ponds back when I was a little girl.
My mom dug around in her photos and came up with this one, to prove to my kids the truth of the story. This was taken when I was 10 years old on a pond in Idaho. We had gone there to visit grandma on Christmas, and conditions were perfect.

I remember when I was a girl there were lots of used skates around to use. Mom would scoop them up at second hand stores, or they were given to us so we had a full selection of sizes for growing feet.

At one point we moved away from Idaho to a place where ponds don't freeze very often. But one year something really special happened that gave us a reason to use the old skates. The lake froze over good and hard. It seems we were out there skating as often as we could before it melted. And one night we had a skating party on the lake, complete with a bonfire on the ice. I can hardly remember a more magical evening. Friends who didn't have skates slipped around in their rubber boots. That evening turned into one of my treasured childhood memories, that my kids helped me remember.

We don't have a pond to skate on here, or a closet of skates, but we do have a little skating rink, and know it is going to provide many evenings of family fun in the future.