Ice Skating at Crown Center with Clara

For our date day today, I wanted to take Clara ice skating.  I took Joshua last year, and I really wanted to take Clara this year, since she's now old enough to do it.  We left directly from soccer and went straight to Crown Center.  Clara has never skated before, and has therefore never been on skates, so I let her practice walking around inside.  She got the hang of it immediately.

We then went out on the ice.  She started off well.  I at first held both of her hands as we slowly went around the rink.  It was hard for her to get used to the fact that she was supposed to just slide along, and she kept wanting to take steps, but I eventually got her to skate.  I then held her by only one hand, and then let her stand by herself.  Last year Joshua skated on his own for a little bit, but Clara wasn't interested in trying that, perhaps due to shaken confidence from an early fall.  We went around another time or two before she decided she was done.  I convinced her to do one last lap, and she reluctantly did it before we headed back in to turn in our skates.

                                   On the way out, I took her picture by the big mural in the hallway.

After ice skating, we went to Fritz's.  Clara was really excited to see the train deliver our food.

After lunch we went back out to the fountain plaza area.  Until several years ago, you could go run through the fountains, but then they fenced them off, but we were still able to get some pictures in front of them

We ended our day with some ice cream from the Sheridan's inside Crown Center.  Because the weather was great today, we found a spot outside to enjoy the ice cream in the sunshine, for a tasty finish to another fun date day.