Bear Mountain Ice Skating

It was a beautiful day out today and the forecast predicted a pretty warm night so we decided to head to Bear Mountain for Ryan's first ice skating experience and Omi, Poppy and Uncle Matt joined us. The rink did not have double-bladed skates for kids, but that didn't stop Ryan: as soon as he was all laced up, he stood up and started walking towards the rink.

While he was a little wobbly at first, he did great and really had no problem maintaining his balance. Until we hit the ice that is...

We had arrived 30 minutes into the session so at first I thought "Oh man, we only will have an hour". After one lap around the rink, Jay and I looked at each other and we were both thinking "This is going to be a very long hour". Because neither of us have skated in a long time, we were both pretty nervous about leading Ryan around the rink. I was petrified of falling on top of him and hurting him (breaking his arm, skating over his fingers, smashing his teeth to name a few of the thoughts I had in the first 5 seconds of the first lap). We realized the best strategy was to each hold one of Ryan's hands and just pull him around.

Uncle Matt, on the other hand, was really sturdy on his skates and when we needed a break, he skated around with Ryan in between his legs.

After almost every lap, Ryan said he wanted to take a break but as soon as he got off the ice, he turned around and said he wanted to go again.

As time went on, we all got better and more comfortable on our skates and even had a few races around the rink:

Of course, Ryan won all of the races and was really good at keeping his skates straight by the end of the session.

I think Dylan would have put on skates if he could too even though he had a fun time goofing off on the side.

As much fun as he had skating, the highlight of Ryan's night was watching the Zamboni go around. We had to stay there until the entire rink was clean and when we were in the car, Ryan announced "I think Poppy needs to ask Santa for a boni for Christmas". Not sure how Santa will pull that one off...