Roller Skating!!

We've lived in Portland for 4 years and FINALLY made it to pre-school roller skating at Oaks Park. You know the kind of awesomely fun roller skating where you can wheel your stroller, your tennis shoes and your rowdy toddlers out on the skating floor with you. It has been on the must-do list since before Alidia was around. And we did it. And it was awesome. And now I kick myself that we haven't gone more. Which I knew I would.

For $5 a kid you get your skate rental, a short little lesson, a snack, and an hour and a half of roller skating fun without any big kids around intimidating you.

What's not to be excited about?? We were ready.

Can't you tell??


Cole and Aviana were the only ones braving the skates today. Not knowing how they were going to do I didn't want to take too many chances putting myself or Alidia onto skates, but next time we'll all be rolling, for sure.

We started out with a little hokey pokey.......


a few balance checks..........


And they were off!

Aviana's wheels were actually screwed a little too tight. She didn't really even roll, but that's OK. She did just fine working out the kinks of balancing up on those silly wheels without them rolling and she loved it so much. If she had been falling all over she might have felt more disappointment and where's the fun in that?


Cole questioned me the whole way to the rink about the safety of this activity and was quite angered when he found out that there were not going to be helmets available to borrow. He thought those roller skating rink people had a lot of nerve...."Do they want people to have to go to the hospital?" And when that made me laugh......"It's not funny mom."



Cole's wheels weren't so tight. There was a lot of wobbling on his end and a lot of floor smacking. But he took it all with a big smile and a lot of laughs. He didn't want to hold my hand very often (which was good, because he was constantly running over my toes) and he barely used the wall, except on the "hills" down at the end of the rink.


We had a snack.......

We met the chipmunk.......

They were even helping each other out in the case of a fall.......

The chipmunk terrified Alidia and I enjoyed carrying her clinging to my neck for a while after that. But not to worry she had lots of fun too........



See? She's having fun!

With ten minutes to go Aviana was out on the rink doing her own thing, oblivious to the whereabouts of the rest of her family. Alidia was still clinging.....keeping a keen eye on the chipmunk and Cole was starting to get some confidence. He was holding on to a wall reaching out for my hand when his skates went one way, his body went another and as he tried to catch his balance he somehow went down cheek first into the ground. There was a good amount of bloody saliva to wash away and I still haven't gotten a real clear look at the inside of his lip. It puffed up pretty huge, but after a few minutes and some ice it started to back down. He insisted there would be no pictures of the injury on the blog......because yes, of course I took some.

However, the last ten minutes of skating looked something like this for everyone but Aviana........


Then we were off to a friend's for lunch and an afternoon of playing. A day well spent.