We took the girls to their first set of skating lessons today. Actually, this was Hanna’s second time at skating lessons, the first was a couple of years ago and was erased from memory, when we determined having the walker on the ice wasn’t helping her with her triple lutzes and sow cows, if anything, the walker was holding her back so we decided to take a break, drink copious amounts of hot chocolate and shove mini-marshmallows in our ears anytime the suggestion of going skating came up.
Today was different. There was something in the air. Perhaps it was the absence of sweaty hockey equipment. Sure there was a presence of mouldy shin pads and bloody laces, but today there was a Febreze flavoured spritz called “learn to skate” emanating throughout the arena.
We arrived one minute before our lessons were to begin. Ellie had fallen into such a deep sleep on the ride over she had flopped, folded onto herself and nearly suffocated on the fur flaps of her hat.
The kids were outfitted with brand new skates, helmets with cages and when those doors opened, they leapt over the four inch high metal barrier and became professional ice dancers, wowing the crowd.
I’ve never seen anything like it. Two kids who had no business making it to the rink, with every reason not to be great skaters, the drool still wet from the spontaneous car-ride nap, proved the world and the on looking Tim Horton’s employees wrong.
At one point, Sale and Pelletier lifted each other in a twirl, suspending time just for a second before gracefully landing directly on the centre circle. The other 100 or so kids scattered as my girls drafted around the ice, with swan-like movements, at times unable to distinguish one from the other, each a dazzling ballerina, one double axel more engaging than the next. Beneath the girth of the bulky padding existed two top-notch skaters who would prove to the world they deserved to be at the mall skating rink and had earned their places in the children’s beginner classes where busy shoppers bustled by, stopping to notice a couple of one-time diamonds in the rough now totally polished.
Just when I thought I’d seen it all, out came the balloons. Balloons filled the ice from every angle, delighted kids celebrated by chasing, catching and whimsically tossing the colourful gifts that had fallen from the ceiling. A magical moment in time some of us were lucky enough to have been part of.
Or, our seven year old could have been put in a group that began with backward skating. A teaching technique I’m simply unfamiliar with. Teaching them to skate in reverse before teaching them how to skate forward?
Our four year old spent fifty-five of the sixty minute class sitting on some padded squares with others of a similar inability to skate and the final five minutes practising how to stand (with assistance)one at a time, two times each until the class was over.
The truth is we did arrive one minute before the classes started. Oh and the balloon thing. That was real.
