Trains and Ice Skating at Crown Center

I was supposed to have a date day with Joshua in January.  The way our rotation has worked out, I've pretty much always had great weather on my date days, including a beautiful day on the first one we ever had last January.  This January was not so great.  So my January date day with Joshua got pushed to today.  Meghan at one point suggested taking Joshua ice skating.  I thought that was a great idea and knew of the outdoor ice skating rink at Crown Center and thought that would be perfect.  But before that, we started with lunch at Fritz's.  It's a train-themed restaurant where you order you food from the phone at your table and then a little train on an overhead track delivers it to a platform above your table, and it's hydraulically lowered down to you. Joshua was pretty excited to look up and watch the trains run around the track.  There were also other non-food-delivering model trains around the restaurant, including one on the other side of the glass at our table.

We were given paper engineer hats (I was mildly amused at the fact that I'm an engineer of a different type than the engineer hat indicates), and Joshua was excited to wear his "choo choo hat".

We then walked over to the skating rink.  Unfortunately, apparently because of snow melting off the canopy and falling on the ice surface, the rink wasn't going to open until 4:30, even though it should have been open all day.  I decided the 45-minute wait was worth it, and Joshua didn't mind at all, because he found a snowbank that he enjoyed repeatedly kicking.  He also found a straw on the ground and had fun beating the snowbank with it, slowly chipping away the icy snow.

Finally we were able to get our skates and head out to the ice.  I wasn't sure how Joshua would do with balancing, but he had no problem at all when we practiced by walking on the mats.

I hadn't ice skated in probably 19 or 20 years, but it came back to me with no problem.  Joshua had never skated before, so I wasn't sure how it would go, but he came through like a champ.  We went around quite a few times, and I held his hand for most of it, and he skated along great.  He would sometimes lose his balance, but I made sure he didn't have any big falls.  Several times I let him skate on his own, and he actually did better that way, maybe because he wasn't overly relying on my hand for balance.  He went very slowly, but he could go maybe 10 feet without falling.  I was very impressed, and I hope this is something we can do again in the future as he gets older, and I'm sure Clara and Hannah will eventually want to join in too.