At the roller rink, my youngest likes to skate next to me, sometimes holding hands, sometimes not. He occasionally wanders off to skate with a friend, but usually he stays pretty close.  His older brother used to do that, but now he’s all about speed.

So when he grabbed my free hand at the rink last time, I was pretty surprised, I held on, though, and the three of us did a loop around the rink. The music is generally too loud to do any talking, but it’s still nice to skate together.

When a girl my oldest knew skated past, and he zoomed off to follow her. A couple loops later, with the girl nowhere in sight, he re-joined us. 

We didn’t get very far before the girl skated up behind him and took his other hand.  His head whipped around in surprise, then he looked at me, eyes wide.

I smiled and threw a chin nod toward the girl, then let go of his hand.  They skated off together.

A few loops later, he was back skating next to us.  I was dying to ask what happened, but there was no graceful way, so I just held his hand.

As we glided around the turn, we passed some girls his age. He casually held out his free hand. No one took it, though. He peeked over his shoulder as we went by, then shrugged and let go of my hand to skate off into the crowd.

I guess I should tell him that the girl took his hand in spite of me being there, not because of it… Nah. I’ll take all the credit I can get.