Ice Skating: Week 5

Quinn did fantastic at ice skating today. He's really turned a corner. Today he skated faster than I've ever seen him go. Stopping is still a bit of a problem and he uses the rink walls to assist with stopping. But in addition to being able to go fairly fast now he's also gliding after a couple of pushes. He'll glide for a bit then start pushing off again. And this is the first week I've seen him showing directional control without pushing off (meaning he's turning while he's gliding). I actually saw him show enough control to skate around a couple of kids that had fallen. In addition to that, he was also skating backwards today. He's going backwards really slow, but he is actually better at skating backwards than I am (not saying a lot, but still). I think he had a really good day and really enjoyed himself, and a large part of that I attribute to him wearing the snow pants. I think that helped keep him drier and warmer than previous weeks which as a result kept him in a much better mood overall. He was getting a bit tired by the time the it ended, but overall he did fantastic. I'm amazed by how much progress he's shown in the past couple of weeks.


Overall it was a great day for him, but for all the kids in general today wasn't so good. Lots of kids were falling today (more so than I had seen in the past). One poor kid had his fingers skated over by another kid. That just happens to be my biggest (and probably irrational and unfounded) fear of ice skating, is that somehow my fingers are going to get sliced off by someone's skates if I fall (it does provide a great motivation to me not to fall though).


There are two new stoplights that have been put in near where I work. This has increased my commute time home by about 25%. It used to take me seven minutes to get home before the lights, but tonight it took nine.

It's still absolutely freezing here (and I mean that quite literally since the high today barely made it into the twenties). And wouldn't you know it, we have an overnight snow advisory. It's already started snowing as I write this. And as things currently stand I'm not going to be able to take the kids sledding tomorrow afternoon. Maybe their school will be late and I'll skip work in the morning and we can try and sled before I have to go to work (probably won't happen, but it's nice to dream that it could). On the positive side, with the temperature this cold, the snow might actually be there for a while provided we get a couple inches and it doesn't end up getting warmer later in the week.