hanging out at the playground during unicycle lessons, i noticed odin’s new haircut ( he requested a “spikey” haircut and even wanted to try out gel?! ) and glasses that he picked out for school make him look all growed up!
he’s getting to be such a big boy. i don’t have to try very hard to look at him and see a teenager. ack!
he only has about a foot to grow before he’s taller than his mother. sigh.
right before we left for vacation we were walking by odin’s school playground and noticed a bunch of kids on unicycles. as it turns out, they’ve been having classes there every wednesday night over the summer and odin definitely thought it was something he’d really, really, really like to learn. and you know what? i’ve always wanted to learn how to unicycle too, so we made a plan to start going to lessons after we got back from vacation.
unfortunately in the few weeks that passed, the instructor of the class left town but some of the kids have decided to keep teaching the classes themselves which is some excellent initiative for kids that aren’t much older than odin.
the first step to learning how to ride a unicycle involves getting used to balancing and pedaling by slowly moving along while holding on to a fence. according to the kids, you’ve graduated from the first level of unicycle training when you can move along two panels of the fence without holding on at all. usually it take about a month of once-a-week practice to gain mastery over the fence.
watching the other kids do bunny hops and ride backwards and forwards is just the right motivation for odin to quickly graduate from holding onto the fence.
what luck! holding hands with poppi is totally within the rules of beginner unicycling 🙂
one day odin will find something that is difficult to learn, but unicycling will apparently not be that thing. after one day of practice he was already close to being able to move along two panels of the fence without holding on. it’s highly doubtful that he’ll need the whole month to graduate from the first level.
his poppi on the other hand, well that’s another story…
maybe one day we can bring the darth vader bagpipe unicycling tradition to viroqua.
odin was climbing in this a totally awesome big ol’ tree climbing tree across the street from butch vig’s parent’s place and i couldn’t help but wonder if maybe he scaled it as a young kid while dreaming of producing records.
it seemed like a nice enough day for a bike ride to try out the new coon prairie trail that was recently finished between viroqua and westby. a bit breezy perhaps, but worth the 8 mile bicycle ride from our house to downtown since we could make a stop for ice cream at ole & lena’s kaffe hus. and, hey, we’ve done a 20 mile bike ride so we knew we could make it.
the ride out was, in hindsight, suspiciously easy because we somehow didn’t notice that we had a 20mph wind to our backs. i guess we should have known something was up when we made it the 8 miles to westby without seemingly having to pedal once.
it was so easy that odin decided he wanted to pick up 4 more miles to make it an even 12 before enjoying ice cream and heading back home. but by the time we made it back to ole and lena’s the winds were gusting up to 40 mph! and we were still 8 miles from home!
we were both still in denial about how hard the rest of the trip was going to be as we relished our ice cream cones and commented on how the crazy wind made for tough going.
i guess we both thought maybe the wind would calm down. we had no idea how wrong we would be.
the next 8 miles were brutal. the wind picked up more, sustaining more than 20 mph and gusting over 40mph. the winds were so strong that you had to pedal doing downhill just to keep moving!
for the first time in his life i saw odin really struggle with the idea he might not be able to accomplish something he set out to do. of course, i told him there was no shame in calling mama and waiting by the road for her to come pick us up.
“poppi, i really want to finish this. but i don’t know if i can. i don’t think i can. i really don’t think i can.”
i told him we’d take it one hill at a time and to listen to his body. just one pedal push after another and another and another. if at some point he didn’t have another pedal push, well that was just fine. we could always try again some other day.
it was amazing to watch him draw upon every ounce of determination he had and make it all the way home.
well, all the way except for the last few blocks when his front tire went flat 🙂
he was pretty tuckered out when we got home but, of course, five minutes later he was asking when we could go outside and play some street hockey.
whoooweee. odin’s team played a game against black river falls. and the black river falls travelling team is their “A” team ( i.e. their best players ). so, we anticipated a “blow out”, especially since it was odin’s teams’ first time playing on “full ice”. they normally play games on half the ice. playing on the whole rink means they have to skate twice as much. against a better team.
all things considered, it was a great game. they hung in really well for the first period before the gas starting running out 🙂
odin played defenceman for the whole game ( he’s number 5 in the lower left of this picture ) and did a great job attempting to keep the puck out of his area of the ice.
in the end, viroqua lost to the better team, 7-1, but i think they were all in relatively good spirits and learned a lot about the importance of playing as a team when facing a formidable rival.
odin’s hockey team occasionally plays a brief scrimmage between periods of high school games. it’s a neat opportunity for them to play to the crowds and the parents of the high school players enjoy watching the young kids play while remembering when their own kids looked so little on the ice.
this was the last home game of the season for the boys high school team, so the arena was packed and boisterous since the boys were already ahead by several points by the end of the first period. exciting! ( odin is looking at the camera with a red mouth guard )
just moments before hitting the ice!
the kids had a great time and maybe enjoyed showing off just a bit 🙂
i took a whole mess of photos at the mighty mite hockey jamboree and somehow, inexplicably, it didn’t even occur to me to take a group shot of everyone on odin’s team wearing their medals!
so i make up for it at the end of the following practice. we had to set up fast, ’cause the zamboni was bearing down us!