Rollerblading

I love rollerblading. I can't remember the exact time in my life I picked it up, but I remember ditching the bike and picking up the blades sometime late jr. high. Biking for very long always made my right knee hurt afterwards. A year or so before this switch-er-roo I threw my back out doing the long jump in gym class and the doctor said that running would always be a problem for me (not to mention that my parents tell me that I learned to run "wrong" when I was a kid). Rollerblading gave me something I could do to keep in shape. More so, I loved the feeling of gliding along the well paved sidewalks of MN, passing people I knew, and stopping by at some key friends' houses to say hi.

Memories are attached to my blades. The only scratches on my current set, and the only scars I have, can be attributed to a single great fall. My brother and I would spend hours out blading together. With the four years between us, it gave us something we could do together that we both enjoyed. Once when I was home for the summer he and I were blading together at a state park when we passed a group of guys his age. They all hooped and hollered at him, telling him his "girlfriend" was a good catch. We laughed the rest of the way back to the canoe. Finally, many a man has tried to take me out rollerblading on dates, actually never having experience (or very little of it) on them. Only one came out without falling. Boyd almost made that number climb to 2 last weekend.....just almost.....

With all the hills around here I haven't bladed much since I came to college. Boyd knows how much I miss it, and so last weekend he went to BYU and rented himself blades. We got mixed comments from people about me going rollerblading while pregnant, but I knew what I was doing and knew to be careful. We went on the path that goes from Geneva to Utah Lake because it's flat and has two key things that remind me of home: water and green trees. Beautiful!!! We leisurely glided by as we watched the ducks with their ducklings, saw daddy's teaching their kids to fish, etc. It was fantastic! The only hard part was keeping myself from wanting to go faster and harder. And Boyd was great! He never even fell......until......After we ate our little picnic he wanted to go the 20 feet to the drinking fountain to refill the water bottle. And the second he put his blade on the pavement, hands and feet went flailing and he came crashing down. So close honey, but not quite!

What a wonderful date!

(Boyd took a little video on his phone of, as he calls it, "the pregnant woman rollerblading", but we can't get it to load on our computer. If we can figure it out, we'll post it up)