One day Erica comes home and while wearing socks, she does this sliding motion across the floor.  I ask her what is she doing, and she says “I’m skaping!”

Our friend Tony and his daugher Isabelle have been going to the local rink near our house so we decided to give it a try… for real.

Well the day we chose was the “Skate with Santa”- translation- the place is a zoo.  We managed to get E a rental (boy’s hockey skates) and got them on without too much drama.  The skates seem to fit, and standing the first time was like watching a newborn deer find its legs for the first time…

The ice opens, and we waddle on up to the rink.  When we got to the ice, E wouldn’t step on, and had to be encouraged.  I’m wondering, ok, how am I going to do this… and trying to think back to when I first learned to skate.

I bent over, took a wide stance, and held her under her armpits.  With her big helmet on, I couldn’t really see what her feet were doing, but we took it slow and tried to make our way over to the kid end of the ice.  As we make our way over,  I’m thinking ’she’s kinda heavy’ and I looked down at her feet… which were lifted off the ice and tucked under like a bird in flight. 

“Stand UP!” 

She makes a feeble attempt at standing… and at that point I knew I had to basically carry her, bent over double, to the other end of the ice… at a snails pace.

Once we got to the other end, my back was ready for shiatsu, and as we couldn’t get a metal stand to help her learn, it basically meant holding her up and trying to help her get her balance.  At that point, we’re told to get off as they needed to clean the ice. 

After a wait, we do the whole thing again, but this time someone saw that she was a total beginner and offered up their metal stand (yes there were kids who could skate just fine, but were using the stands for whatever reason). 

From that point on, it wasn’t bad.  She could stand and with Isabelle’s encouragement, get some forward progress.  It was funny to watch her try to “run” with skates on rather than angle the toe out and push off… and she fell down every 20 seconds… and for me it was like picking up a 30lb sack of potatoes every 20 seconds. 

Still, I think she had fun, and even got a helium balloon and candy cane from Santa out of the experience.

We went to see the Optometrist today, and the recommendation is that kids over the age of 3 should also have their vision checked. I was wondering how do you get a small kid to sit and peer through that big eye thingy (the one where you look at a chart and he asks you “Is 1 or 2 better?” while changing the magnification) and get a reasonably accurate response?
We’ve been seeing Dr. Wang for years, and the last time we were in his office, Erica was about Sam’s age (16 months).

Erica was first up, so I took her in and seated her in the big chair. On the LCD monitor, he then projects some clip art of common objects- a horse, a truck, a cake, etc. and asks what they are. I know that Erica know all the objects, but she goes all shy and whispers to me “I want mommy” but eventually comes around to answering. Dr. Wang is pretty soft spoken, but Erica was so shy that her answers were even softer, so I had to restrain myself from blurting out the answers. Anyways, once Dr. Wang was satisfied that she understood the objects, he then shrunk them down, and asked her to repeat the object names while covering one eye.

Next, he played a cartoon and watched her eyes as she focussed on the screen. From the tests he could determine that she’s 20/20 with a bit of far sightedness in the right eye.

I almost wish I got the kid version of the test rather than the regular “is 1 or 2 better?”

Everytime we come in, there seems to be a new gadget or test. There’s a camera which takes a photo of your retina, that was pretty cool to see… and to measure pressure, there used to be a machine that puffed some air on your eye. Now there are these eye drops that kind of sting and is like iodine mixed with glue.  It takes a few hours to blink that stuff out, but I guess it’s a better test.