If it wasn't for the terror and the physical agony...
Sophia and I went ice-skating today; it was Sophia's first time ever, and my first time since 1991, I'd estimate. Back then I was 13 years old, my family was living in western New York State, and my youngest brother had not yet been born. Although it had been over 16 years it took me only about an hour today to remember the very basics of skating; it was all intuition and muscle memory. It was a bit strange for me to use hockey skates this time around; in the past I'd always used figure skates since I could never get used to not being able to move my ankles while skating. It was weird and constricting.
Anyway, while I had this minor irritation with my skates Sophia's were causing her chronic agony. Like C-clamps where her arches should have been! Oh, have I mentioned that my beautiful, darling wife has no arches on her feet? They're flat! Like pizzas! She'd be the perfect grape stomper, just like Lucy and Ethyl. So not only has she never skated before, she must learn how in terrible pain! Terrible The Little Mermaid after she was transformed into a human but before Disney got their claws into her pain!
Apart from all that scheiße it was a lot of fun for us. Sophia was so cute in her largely successful attempts to skate. She did not even fall down once and progressed from hugging the wall in blind panic to coasting past other wall-huggers with only moderate anxiety and skating away from the wall for 10 - 20 seconds at a time; at moderate speeds, too. My wife excels at learning new skills, and I am very proud of her. We started by skating half-a-lap to the penalty box together whereupon she'd rest and I'd skate a lap or two and then we'd skate to the bleachers together - she'd rest again while I skated some laps, rinse, repeat. Eventually the pain was too much and we decided to turn in our skates and call it a day, but we managed over an hour of skate time without actually strangling the little shits that would skate circles around us and generally get in our way.
If I may indulge in a bit of schadenfreude; one of said "little shits" who actually skated in between us while I was trying to keep Sophia steady somehow got knocked upside the head. I saw his father leading him to the bleaches whereupon he applied and icepack to his head. Good times.
