A few weeks ago the kids and I tried ice skating for the first time.  It was a lot trickier to do on my own than I thought it would be.  It took us about twenty minutes to put on all of our gear, and once we were on the ice we didn't make much headway.  I had one child on each arm, their legs moving like a roadrunners, all of us off-balance and falling all over the place.  After twenty minutes on the ice, we'd only gone about fifteen feet.  The kids begged to put on their boots and play on the playground and I relented without much argument.

Yesterday mom and dad came to town so that we could give ice skating another try.  It was a beautiful day - mid-30's, sunny and no wind - the perfect day for skating.  With an improved adult to kid ratio, gearing up took much less time and we were out on the rink quickly.  Sophie loved it, slip sliding all over the place and laughing.  Martin mostly wanted to slide on his knees and tell the other kids that his dad has a puck.

With some tough love encouragement from my dad, Martin got the hang of it and made his way around the rink.  I managed to get some photos and video of the afternoon.  Some of the video is a bit shaky, but that's because I was filming while skating backwards.  BECAUSE I'M THAT AWESOME.  Okay, not so awesome.

Download | Duration: 00:01:35

Mom and dad - thank you so much for skating with us.  It was great fun and we were happy to spend the afternoon together.

Technical notes: I'm learning more about how to make a movie on the Mac, but I'm still a novice.  The movie ends abruptly, much like our afternoon.  Also, I'm trying a new video loading method and I have no idea how it will play for you.  Let me know how it views so I can try to learn from whatever I did, if I can remember, that is.