Ending the Season on a High

Ice skating season is over in our little town, alas. I dreaded its passing this year, because the girls and I enjoy it SO much. It was also the first year that the three of us really took advantage of the nearly abandoned weekday afternoon skating hours, sometimes just the three of us, sometimes with a huge passel of friends, and so we'll all have that to miss.

But before the rink closed, we had one more date at the rink with all our friends:

The kids reached the tween-ish milestone of getting chastised over the intercom by the staff, although they were unable to appreciate such a distinction since the intercom only sounds like "Mwa-wa-wa-WA!" on the ice. It meant, however, "Stop darting around in all directions like maniacs before you kill each other!", and so order was somewhat restored. Although for a while there was an IU hockey player skating around before his practice began, and I swear that he was using our children as obstacles to slalom around at the last millisecond while skating a million miles an hour.

At least that was AFTER the children had stopped darting around the ice in all directions like maniacs.

The majority of the week, however, was spent in daily rehearsals for the Spring Ice Show. The kids were champs about all the work involved in being in the show, and were pretty great, if I do say so myself, in their performance, set to a confusing mash-up of the Hawaii Five-Oh theme song and a Hawaiian hula number. The children themselves, although garbed in grass skirts and with flowers pinned to their hair, did their usual Alpha-level skills of crossovers, glides, snowplow stops, and touching their toes while skating, while also skating in lines, circles, and figure eights, and at one point doing, inexplicably, the macarena. In my video of the performance, you can hear me laughing during that part--oops!

In other words, it was marvelous.

And thus the season ended, as all sporting seasons should, with medals--


--and milkshakes.