Skating Lesson

Saturday morning I took Casey to the local skating rink for a beginner’s skating class. Flamingo Joe was busy cleaning up the Great Toilet Overflow of 2010 so he couldn’t come with us. I figured getting the kids away from the GTO 2010 was a way to be helpful since Grandma was at the church setting up for Coffeehouse – the kids are semi-helpful for about 3 minutes in a manual labor scenario, then wander off to throw rocks in the water and look for the hand-truck. So it seemed best to just get them away. As it turned out, while I was gone with the kids, Grandma returned and held an 8 foot sheet of drywall over her head while FJ screwed it into the ceiling, so at the end of the day I still had to feel guilty.

When we got to the skating rink, the lady asked me if I was paying for two for the class or just one and she looked at Mace. I asked her if he was too young and she said no, her daughter had been skating since she could walk, so I said sure, let’s try it. I was not looking forward to chasing Mace around the arcade while Casey was skating anyway, so I rented his cute little skates and began reciting the Roller Skating Courage Litany for Two Year Olds (it goes something like this: “WOW! You have on SKATES, just like the BIG KIDS! Aren’t they GREAT?! You are SO BIG! I am SO PROUD! Let’s go out here and find Casey – No? Well we’ll just skate across the floor then and sit on that bench by the wall so we can see him better. Oh SURE we will, it will be FUN! WOW! You have on SKATES, just like the BIG KIDS! . . . .”).



And somehow the force of momentum kept him in that thirty-minute class for a full 15 minutes, which the teacher said was a great accomplishment. She told me at the beginning that if he made it ten minutes, it would be great for a two year old, so I was very proud he made it 15 minutes with no tantrum. At one point, to avoid an impending tantrum I told him he had trains on his feet and that kept him in the class for another 5 minutes. I’m starting to catch on to this parenting thing now that my womb is closed for business (never to reopen). Mind you, Mace will turn 3 this Saturday and still sleeps with pacifiers and has almost zero interest whatsoever in potty-training, but I can make him keep roller skates on his feet for 15 minutes, so I get a Mommy Award.

But Casey was the big story of the day. He was one of three kids in the 25-kid class that had on in-line skates and he got right in there and skated his little heart out. Keeping his skates on every waking moment for the past two weeks seems to have given him an edge up on the other beginners because he really caught on to everything very quickly and only fell a few times.

He “graduated” at the end of his class and gets to go into the Super Skater I class next week. He still skates like a 92 year old man shuffling to the dessert line at Piccadilly, but maybe they’ll work that out in Super Skater I class.