Sledding, Skating And Cookies

What a great weekend! Most weekends we have a lot of fun, but this one was especially memorable. Mostly, I would say that it was memorable because of how proud I was of Helena in addition to how much fun we had. Helena often complains that she doesn’t get to play with friends enough, so we started Saturday morning with sledding with her friend Emily. Any sledding excursion that has more laughs and smiles than whining is a good one in my book and this one was just about all smiles.

Later in the day we baked delicious banana oatmeal chocolate chip cookies that turned out better than I expected. Helena was a big help and even spooned out some of the cookies herself. This was her first time baking cookies that were not Christmas cookies. In fact, it could have been my first time baking chocolate chip cookies of any kind. We also scratched off “building a snow fort” from our winter activity list, although it was not quite the great success we had hoped it to be. Not because of my lack of engineering skills, but because Helena was excited about it until it was actually finished, at which point she wanted to go inside. Something that daddy thought was a little bit annoying.

But truly the most exciting part of the weekend was taking Helena ice-skating for the first time. We had been talking about going for a few weeks, but never could quite fit it in to our schedule. Then on Sunday when she asked if we could go ice-skating we thought sure, why not. I never quite know what to expect with a four-year-old, but I assumed that we would be lucky to make it skating for an hour before she wanted to leave. Boy was I wrong. In fact, I couldn’t have been more wrong. She had a blast skating and we were there for just about two hours. She really picked it up quickly and had such a good time. Every trip around the rink she waved to mom in the stands and by the end of it she was really moving quite quickly for someone who never skated before. Take a look at the video below to see just how well she was doing (set to her favorite Frozen song). She just tried so hard and didn’t give up. I hope that’s the kind of person she becomes. Last week it was swimming and now skating. Can’t wait for what’s next.