The winter Olympics have been over for weeks now, but the amazing athletes that my children watched and cheered on will be in their memories for a long time. It took one day of watching the Olympics for my kids to try out their own "Olympic" feats at home. My 5-year-old happily dragged out boards of plywood from his father's wood shop through the snow while my 10-year-old and 9-year-old gathered up logs to prop up the board. In no time a nice jump for their Olympic re-enactment of the snowboarding and skiing competition was in place. Flying down our small hill there were shouts of pure joy for "landing" the jump they made along with lots of high 5's to each other. 

Move on to the speed skating competition and almost immediately the rollerblades are on and our four kids are doing their "Olympic" speed skating around my dining room table and up and down the hall. Ice skating and roller skating happens to be an activity that we love to do as a family, so recently we had a birthday party for our daughter and niece at the area roller rink, Watertown Family Skate Express. Another great opportunity for my four children and my six nieces and nephews who all also happen to be very skilled roller skaters, to show off their love of speed skating along with our friends and other relatives. It was also a great opportunity to catch some action photos. 

Below, my two nieces are pictured practicing for the push races. The lighting in the rink is fairly dark at times, so it can be a challenge to get a super sharp action photo, but I was really excited about this one.  For this photo I had a focal length of 24 mm 1/15 sec at f/2.8 and panned the girls as they came by pressing the shutter and following the shot through as they continued skating. 

Working to get the skate in perfect sharpness was a fun challenge and turned out great with this next photo. This little guy was fast. :) With only our family at the rink, I was able to sit in the middle of the floor close to the skaters and catch them going by without having to use my telephoto lens and as an extra plus not worry about getting run over. The focal length in this photo was also at 24mm 1/13 sec at f/2.8.

Here's a few of the skating crew preparing and listening to rink owner Marty Laufer as he explains the rules of the race. 

The push races involves the front skater staying still while the back skater pushes them around the rink. This is actually super tough, I think, after trying it once or twice I'm more afraid of rolling over my child so I let them work it out. It always amazes me how fast they pick it up.

While it's probably highly unlikely none of my kiddos will someday make it to the Olympics, it's sure fun watching them prepare. Of course in March in Wisconsin we had about a week of warm weather, the snow melted and I put away the "Olympic" snowboarding jumps. I had been happily making plans and thinking about my gardens and spring flowers. This morning we woke up to several inches of snow and I hear shouts of joy coming from the kids. They're already making plans of dragging out the plywood to practice their Olympic snowboarding skills. :)