Eislaufen

Suiting up for a morning on the ice

Today we had a happy coincidence: the children’s dearest wish (ice skating) intersected nicely with Dennis’s and mine (exhausting the children utterly).  So we visited the ice rink at the corner of our block, at long last.

We arrived right when the rink opened, and so Ella and Alex got to flounder and fall in relative safety as they found their legs.  But they had it so much easier than I did when I was learning to skate, clinging to the grimy edges of the indoor hockey rinks.  This rink rented Laufers, or walkers, for the children, and, happily, had one style that was shaped like a little chair, a perfect little ice pram for Joey.

Pausing to watch the skaters

There were a competitive skaters practicing in the center of the rink, and Alex would occasionally pull his little walker over to the edge to watch them.  “Mom, they’re spectacular!”

My kids were less than spectacular on the ice, but they sure did have fun.  After a while Joey got restless with just sitting, and so we let him trot around on the ice with his own little walker before him.  He and I had been skating aside Alex, and Joey showed immediately how closely he’d been studying his big brother’s technique.  After every dozen or so steps, Joey would carefully stop and lay down on the ice, and then stand up, deliberately brush himself off, and restart.  Falling: it’s a part of it, you see.

There’s a little cafe connected to the rink, with rubberized floors so we didn’t have to change out of all those skates, so we had mid-skate snack.  But by the time we got home around 1:00, the kid were, as planned, exhausted, but also (unplanned) cranky from food deprivation.  So we stayed home for a couple of hours and puttered and ate.  But as soon as the kids got their wily spark back, we left the house again for Round 2 of Project Early Bedtime.

We were hoping to visit a shop that reportedly sold good coffee (Peet’s, we miss you!), but, sadly, being Sunday, they were closed. (Sometimes restaurants and cafes stay open, but we were unlucky.) It was a balmy 22 degrees out, though, so we took a tromp through the Old City District of Zürich.

One of the nicest things about Zürich is that they seem to have a playground on every block. When we’re out walking with the kids, we can just point out the next playground and they dash on ahead and play until we catch up.

We walked, thus, to the intersection of the Limmat and Sihl rivers,

and then turned up toward the Landesmuseum, or Swiss National Museum.  We didn’t go in as it was approaching 4:00, but the building astounded us all.  It’s just over a hundred years old but is built in the style of a French Renaissance chateau.


The kids played in a Spielplatz in its shadow until Dennis and I were thoroughly frozen.  The kids, of course, were fine.

And they were asleep by 8:00.