Had a great time with P&B’s kids, an unplanned overnight visit that extended into Saturday with a trip a local farm for pumpkin “picking” and later to the Kennedy Memorial Skating Rink in Hyannis.
Unfortunately, I didn’t bring the camera to either outing, but I let the kids use the digital camera in the morning, and between all of us, we came up with some cute pix, which I’ve uploaded to Flickr.
The kids were really well-behaved this time, for which I thanked them, and Bob commented that he’d also noticed “how much they’d matured” since their last visit during the summer.
They also invented some new games, like “bash your head into the wind chimes” and “hobble around like an old man with a walking staff”.
We had the last of a week’s worth of rain yesterday, but caught a break long enough to get our pumpkins, one each for the kids and a fine one for me, too. We’ll polyurethane them to protect them from critters.
I’d bought Emme a pair of ice skates at a yard sale, but they turned out to be the wrong size, so I ended up getting rental skates for all of the kids. We found that figure skates worked out the best.
The crew at the skating rink couldn’t have been nicer. The rink wasn’t very crowded, which was fortunate for us – Emme needed help from one of the staff getting around before we got her the proper size skates, and James and Bob also needed to trade theirs in until we found the right size and style.
At first, James had trouble with his skates “slipping” on the ice, but he soon figured out that’s exactly what they are supposed to do.
At one point, James was skating faster than Bob, which prompted him to say “I’m teaching Bob to skate”, to which Bob replied, “Yeah, RIGHT.”
By the end of the 2 hour session, Bob had found his footing, and James was running on his skates from one side of the rink to the other, proud that he could skate “in the middle”. People commented on how well the “little guy” was doing. Even after getting a nice cut on his arm from one spill, James was unstoppable.
Peter told me afterwards that James has been talking about skating for over a year, so I was happy that we decided to go. Doing things without a plan sometimes works out the best.