The Roller Skating Party

This post serves as a most public thank-you to all parents who have thrown birthday parties which involve physical activity.  Ice skating, dancing, active back yard games, gymnastics, bouncy houses, and mini golf are our kind of party activities.  When you combine these activities with the requisite pizza, cake, and assorted other high carb and high fat foods, things turn out better for my child than when party food is combined with the beading party she chose to have to celebrate her own birthday last year.

This Friday’s party was at a roller rink.  If you’re recalling the pie-in-the-face party of a couple of weeks ago and thinking, ‘Gee…it sounds like this woman’s social life revolves around attending Friday night birthday parties for 9 year olds,’ you’re quite right.  Welcome to my world.

Despite never having been roller skating before, my daughter impressively got the hang of it after hugging the wall next to the skate-rental for 20 minutes or so.  Desperate not to be left behind by her free-wheeling friends, she managed to get around the rink faster and faster on each attempt.  She entered the rink with a blood sugar of 170, just about perfect for a pre-roller skating number, I thought.  Of course, I didn’t know exactly what roller skating would do to her, but I do know that steady walking and also ice skating send her in a moderate, steady downward path. 

I was certain she’d gotten the hang of it when 45 minutes into the party she appeared out of nowhere saying, “I feel low.  Do you have my meter?”  She was 70.  She munched some smarties and nursed her bruises for a few minutes, and was off again.  “This is really fun, mom!”

Another half an hour later, at pizza and cake time, she was still about 70.  It was time to guess the carbs in one rectangular piece of pizza and a rectangle of “cookie cake,” a giant sheet-cookie with a border, decorations, and writing in thick icing.  I imagine I was squinting and furrowing my brow as I tried, in my mind’s eye, to make the pizza into a triangle and the cookie cake into a circle to properly judge their size and therefore their carbohydrate content. Then I had to add a bit for the cookie’s frosting, and subtract a bit from each to compensate for the 70 blood sugar, and for the exercise which would still catch up with her as the hours progressed.

My counting and variable considering resulted in a not-so-terrible 200-ish by 10 p.m.  I can’t say the rest of the night was perfect either, blood sugar wise.  But the post-party aftermath was better than it often is. 

Roller skating is in our birthday party plus column, both because it’s “really fun,”  and because it’s a really decent antidote to pizza and cake!