Tuesday, December 31, 2013

First Time Skating

Katherine, today is New Year’s Eve and 2013 has been filled with many special moments with you. You bring so much joy to our lives and we enjoy every day we get to spend with you.

Today was a beautiful sunny and warm day – how perfect to wrap up a beautiful year! Your dad and I had been talking for a bit about going downtown to the outdoor ice-rink to see if you would enjoy being on skates, and looking outside around lunch time, today seemed like a perfect day for it.

Wrapped in warm jackets and gloves we made our way to the skate rental. You were very excited… and your daddy and I? Well, we hadn’t been on skates for many, many years, so the closer the moment came to actually get on the ice, the more silly our jokes became. We carefully put you on the ice (luckily the rental place also had one of those handy push bars for you). At first you weren’t quite sure what to think about the skates and the fact that your legs now slid back, forth and sideways on the ice, but after a few moments you got the hang of how to drape your arms around the push bar while keeping your legs on the ice. Your daddy and I did pretty much the same thing at first – figuring out how to keep our legs on the ice while hanging on to the push bar! But it didn’t take long for your daddy to get his “skating legs” back and he started to quite elegantly move on the ice again (I had never seen him skate as long as I have known him, so I was quite impressed how well he skated!). I wanted to follow, but your plan was different – you asked me to wrap my arms around you while pushing you and the push bar around the rink. Snuggled up together like this we made our rounds around the rink – I loved it!

I couldn’t have thought of a more special way of spending the afternoon of the last day this year.

You are teaching me that when we spend time together as a family life is perfect, filled with love, laughter and adventure. As we look forward to a new year, I hope we’ll have many more days like today ahead of us. I love you always and forever.