Every few weeks I'll be featuring an activity that is cheap or free (because I'm cheap and I love free) to do with your family from the takeonPG website. This week we did #238 - Practice your crossovers.
Almost every child who grew up in Prince George knows how to ice skate. Maybe not well, but we've all learned how in school. My mom told me that every week in kindergarten, my class would go to the Elksentre with tiny classroom chairs and parent volunteers and we all learned how to ice skate. By the end of the winter, most of the kids were skating by themselves without the aid of the chairs. The reason that my mom and I were discussing ice skating in schools was because last Saturday, I took my family to the Family Skate at the Prince George Coliseum and I discovered that my husband never learned how.
He's told me before that he can't skate. What I heard was "I don't skate well." I thought that every kid in Canada learned to skate. It turns out that when you're a kid in Surrey, you go on a few field trips to the ice rinks (maybe three times total) and the only kids who know how to skate are the ones who play hockey or figure skate.
So in the interest of helping me research and experience activities for the takeonPG launch, my husband agreed to give ice skating the ol' PG try. So we put the toddler in the van and we met my mom at the Coliseum and we skated, or at least tried to.
I am always surprised when I do an activity that I haven't done in years (ice skating, roller skating, skiing, snowboarding, etc) that I'm not as good as I remember. I stepped on to the rink with a vision of myself gliding into the middle of the rink and doing triple salchows and figure eights. I don't know why I think that I can do these things now when I couldn't do them twenty years ago.
I was struggling to remember how to skate and my husband was trying his best to learn how to skate while my mom was pulling the crying toddler around the rink in a sled with a rope that was too short. Meanwhile, five and six year olds are skating circles around us as we're laughing and trying really hard not to fall over and crush the children. (My husband really wanted to make a rule that if you knew how to skate you couldn't hug the wall so that he could have it all to himself.) So many families were there having fun. And everyone there could skate except us. And no one cared that we couldn't. Go ice skating. It's a blast even if you don't know how.
