I thought it would be fun to take the three girls skating yesterday to celebrate the first day of Christmas holidays.

My idea of fun might differ from others. Mine includes threatening to take everything the kids hold dear to them away if they fight me on wearing snow pants, then being told by Hanna after several minutes of searching, “I don’t know where mine are, but I know I brought them home from school.” She said it in a way that would imply, “I think my Mom hid them in the safe and nobody has the combination.”

Hanna finally agreed her survival was more important than being seen in last year’s purple snow pants and held firm on not leaving her new ones at school though she did tell me, “It doesn’t matter if I lost my new snow pants. If I have to wear these old ones, I’ve already lost my dignity.”

Just for fun (again, my idea of fun) we drove to the school to have her knock on the door and hope someone might be inside to let her have a quick peek to see if I had maybe driven in the wee hours of the night to the school to hang her pants on the hook marked “Hanna” outside of her classroom just so I could say, “I told you so” before we headed to the rink.

There they were! My sleep-driving is really coming along.

I had forgotten how much fun it is to tie three kid’s skates in addition to my own and then bend at the waist while holding a slippery four year old around as we shuffled around a freshly cleaned ice surface.

The older girls complained about having to wear helmets, the placement of certain last-year-celebrity stickers on the helmets, the general tightness of the helmets and why their Mom drove to the school to hide their snow pants on them while they slept.

They were disappointed in my abysmal attempts at spins and jumps as they shouted from the bench for me to perform like a circus monkey.

The last thing I remember before my big finish was hearing Chloe (age 4) say, “Mommy’s not very good at this.”

Merry Christmas!

photo is a likeness