August 31, 2010
How To: Procure A Partner With Perfect Pictures!
If you or your kid are looking for a skating partner, I don't need to tell you how hard it is to get one. It's not enough that the person needs to live close enough and have compatible training times. Oh no, then come the physiological constraints. Height, weight, mass, ability, and yes, financial capacity (shock horror!).
August 28, 2010
How to: Know When To Stop
Stopping skating is a hard decision.
Whether you are the skater, or the parent, the years of dedication (up at 5am when you really didn't want to anyone?), commitment (towards yourself, coach, and the whole entourage) and sacrifice (financial and emotional not to mention the fact you really could have used that money for a family holiday) are a lot to leave behind. It's a bitter pill to swallow. I've been through it. Sort of.
August 27, 2010
How to: Congratulate your skater!
This post has been inspired by Ice Mom who recently showed up in my Twitter feed exclaiming her daughter Ice Girl had passed her Intermediate moves test. Congrats! This got me thinking. I remember that lightheaded buzz a skater gets from passing a test. All that preparation, all that concentration, and then the validation we seek in order to keep moving forward, always higher, stronger, harder, in that search for perfection.
August 25, 2010
Ice-Weddings!
This isn't so much a how to, or an informative post, as much as a rambling of thoughts on the subject! Bear with me!
With Xue Shen and Hongbo Zhao's on-ice wedding ceremony this month (even though they have been officially married for some years), it got me thinking about tying the knot on the ice. I've recently gotten engaged myself and am revelling in the bridal magazines and hundreds if not thousands of beautiful candy-toned blogs dedicated to the big day. So how could I avoid writing a skating-wedding post?! I could not! *Runs valiantly to keyboard*!
How to: Not Die Of Boredom At The Ice Rink!
Seasoned skating parents have got it down to a fine art, and how best to spend time during your child's practice session is going to be different for each individual. What's common to all of us though is the fairly obvious; cold and humid conditions for hours on end, and a million and one things that need doing at home and/or at work! Heck, I often feel like this and I'm not even a parent. So how can new comers to our sport find a way to make this 'dead time' work for them?
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