Sophie was very excited to go ice skating today. She first mentioned it weeks ago with high excitement and made me promise we’d go skating during our Christmas visit.

A few days later she realized she didn’t own any skates and called, greatly upset, to make me promise we’d get her some from the “store.”

This remained a major topic of conversation through this morning, when we got out to Cairns Arena in Burlington.  We rented skates, got everybody laced up, and headed to the ice.  Sophie walked with us, balancing somewhat precariously on her blades, and eagerly stepped out onto the rink, holding our hands.  Immediately, she spun around in horror and announced:

It’s slippery!

We insisted she try it anyway (despite the unexpected slipperiness), holding the wall tightly, and holding our hands, but she burst into tears, and skated with us only grudgingly.

After a while she discovered (by chance) that falling wasn’t fatal, and so made her primary purpose on the ice to fall.  Until she fell a bit too hard, and thereafter refused to set foot on the ice again, instead watching us from the sidelines.

Her summary of the event, recounted to anybody who asks anything about skating is simply:

It was slippery!  I fell on my butt.

My stocking this Christmas included some scratch-off lottery tickets.  Of course, I asked Sophie to help me scratch them off.

Each time she uncovered a number with the edge of her penny she gleefully announced what number she found.  Being three years old and being thus unable to read, she declared most of them were “eight.” I took the chance to point out the numbers’ correct names.

“That’s a five!” I’d say, after scratching off one of the “winning numbers” spaces.  When she later uncovered a second five under “your numbers,” I was able to say, “That’s another five, just like this one here.  See?  Five… five!”

Attentive readers will at this point suspect that uncovering such matching numbers would indicate a winning ticket.  I, at the time, didn’t even notice.  The only point of having two identical numbers was to show Sophie what they looked like.  Immediately after saying, “it’s just like this other five up here,” I announced to the other adults, “aww, no matches; this one’s a loser.”

They had to correct me.  And then review all the other tickets we’d done.

(It only won $2, but I could as easily have been discarding a $2,000 game in favor of a reading lesson.)