I am going to enter this post in my New York Nuisance category but quite honestly I suppose it could have happened anywhere, although New Yorkers have been known to be quite straightforward and by that I sometimes mean, obnoxious.
Although, I have this conversation about New Yorkers being straightforward quite often with my colleague at work who hails from London and she says yes, New Yorkers are straightforward and can be rude, but many times are often actually quite nice.
I am still going to go with obnoxious for this post ONLY though, because duh, I love New York....{sometimes, no actually always, no maybe just most of the time but not always, I mean it is a tough town people, tough, like I always say, 'it will chew you up and spit you out like no place else you have ever been' and it's true, trust me been there and been spat out.}
Apologies, I digress.
So the girls went skating three times last week while they were on vacation...or stay-cation as I like to call it and if I wasn't so tired I would go through my previous posts and find the one where I wrote about how we like to stay home on some of our vacations because we usually never get to stay home and chill in our house and we love to do that. So we call it a stay-cation and sometimes the girls even think that is a real thing.
Sorry if I am going off-course, but I am writing this at night and I am a little more free-flowing when I write at night. I actually kind of like it. I did also have a large glass of wine so you know, you do the math, prolific or sauced?
So anyway, skating...three times last week... and the first day they were really rusty because they hadn't been skating in about a year. The second day they were showing confidence and skating all over the ice as if they skated every day and by the third day they were a notch below Olympic quality.
Total exaggeration of course, but just saying, they were good.
So good in fact, that they were doing turns with arms that started stretched out and were being pulled in to their chests causing their speed to increase, jumps, backward skating and lots of leg lifts in the air. I mean it, they were good. The woman sitting next to me even asked me where they take lessons and how long they have been skating.
I was like "oh, no they don't take lessons", and then I trailed off in my mind, this is just something we do on stay-cation when we don't feel like going skiing like everyone else in this town, like doesn't ANYONE go to the beach anymore? All we ever hear about is skiing.
Skiing, I don't get it. I am perfectly sure that it is great fun and I probably would love it, but the truth is when I plan a vacation I just want it to be somewhere sunny and warm, if not downright hot with lots of relaxing where my girls can jump and play in the waves and smell like sun block twenty-four seven, and I can lay on the beach watching them.
So as Drew and I sit watching the girls skating, we see the instructor skate over to them and she starts telling them something. I see their faces sort of contorting and not really knowing how to act given what she has just said. I asked Drew what he thought that woman had said to our children and he was like "don't worry about it, just chill."
So a little while later I go down to give them a drink or something, I can't remember because Drew and I are like their step and fetch-its when we are at the rink or actually correction, whenever we are anywhere we are their step and fetch-its.
Lily will be two feet from the refrigerator and be like, "I am thirsty, Mom can you get me a drink?"
So here we are sitting in this warm area looking down on the rink through this giant piece of glass and we THINK, hey this is pretty nice and wow! it will be nice to sit here for a few minutes in peace, but no...even from the ice the girls are pulling all the strings calling on us to do things for them.
They constantly signal to us that they "need a drink" or "can I take off my gloves?" or "PLEASE, no other kid has a hat and gloves on."
I always answer back, "Do you want someone to skate over your fingers and cut them off because that could happen? Or "do you really want to hit your head and never be able to do anything ever again because your brain has hemorrhaged?"
"No" they answer, "not really."
"Then put that hat back on!" I say "or I am going to make you wear a helmet like some of these other kids."
So on one of the water runs I go down and I ask the girls what that skating instructor said to them. They told me that she told them not to do turns and some of the other things they were doing unless they have been properly trained.
I don't know but something about that conversation between an ADULT, and not me as the ADULT, and two kids, a nine and six year old that has occurred when my girls were not in school and therefore not required to be on their best behavior, rubbed me the wrong way.
I couldn't help but feel like that conversation or more accurately that instructor speaking AT my girls was somehow off-base.
I mean, I was comfortable with the level of dangerousness {not a word, I know} that the girls were taking on by doing some of the moves they were doing and last I checked, I was the Mother and she was a skating instructor at the town rink.
Not to mention that she has now just scared both my girls and convinced them that they were going to hurt themselves. AND, anyone that's anyone knows that if you are ever going to learn something new, there is a small degree of pain and perhaps falling on the ice that may have to take place and now they were scared and you can't learn how to do jumps or twirls when you are scared. They were double scared actually, scared to fall AND scared to get in trouble.
And so that instructor made that decision for my girls and I didn't like it. Not to mention the fact that she makes her living off of giving private ice skating lessons and my girls in three days were skating better than all of her lessons COMBINED! Immature? I suppose, but yeah I said it.
I think what I would have preferred was if she had asked the girls where their parents were and then spoke directly to me about what her concerns were. That would have been more appropriate than speaking to them directly.
But thank god my girls don't listen to anyone anyway because they just went about their business and kept doing exactly what she had just asked them not to do. Only this time around, every time they did a jump or a twirl, they looked at her first and made sure she wasn't watching.
The first time ever, that I was proud of the fact that they need to be told something four times before it actually takes hold.
Proud moment it was. Very definitely a proud moment.
