Disclaimer: This post is several months overdue, as are several others. Hopefully, over the next several days, maybe weeks, we can get the Barrios presence on these here interwebs updated.

We took a page out of the Pierz's playbook and took the girls ice skating last weekend.  It's not that we don't come up with fun things to do with the girls on the weekend, but I have to hand it to Geoff and Colette.  They always come up with the most fun activities.  Ice skating had never really crossed my mind at this age, but if you set you expectations accordingly, you can have a lot of fun.

The girls had been excited about it for days.  We opted to take them to their ballet classes and then headed over to the rink.  In hindsight, this was a tactical error.  You see, normally we skip breakfast before ballet in favor of a small snack, and then, afterward, we usually do breakfast.  Because of the hours for open skating, however, we had to delay the late breakfast until after ice skating.  Needless to say, the girls were a bit cranky.

After getting past the extra drama, we had a lot of fun.  Next time we go, we'll have to investigate whether there's a session were they have the garbage cans for the little kids to skate with (the basically work like little walkers).  Without the walkers, Viv and I just took each of the girls and held them out in front of us while we skated along.  It worked really well, but it was a little hard on our backs.  Yes, we're getting old.  The first lap went really well.  The girls really liked getting scooted around the ice.  By the second lap, we started to try to get the girls to try to shift their weight over their feet rather than leaning back into us.  This was less for teaching them and more for helping our old backs.  As soon as we did that, the slipperyness of the ice became apparent to both of them.  The fear set in next, but then they calmed down and all was good again.

Ultimately, the hunger started setting in and we called it a success after five, or six, laps.  The girls then sat outside the rink, up against the glass, while Viv and I took turns doing a few more laps.  They got a kick out of us passing them as they looked on from the other side of the glass.

While we were getting their skates off, I asked Marielle whether not not she had fun.

To which she replied, "Dad, I never want to go ice skating again."