Out With The Old...

Today was one of those days where I was constantly reminded that, as much as I fancy myself as a professional skateboarder (I wish!), I am in fact a husband and a father and have to prioritise that before everything else.

I work shifts which usually involve a four day week. These four days can be any of the seven, but I always have at least one day off mid-week. This suits me as the kids are in school and the adults are in work which makes for empty skateparks and empty streets.

After getting up early, I had spent a good deal of time in the house because I was expecting a few important deliveries that I had ordered over the weekend. In that time it was only fair that I did my bit around the house, so four loads of washing were despatched and the mountain of dishes I'd left from the night before were taken care of along with some miscellaneous other household chores.
That was the husband part of the deal taken care of for the day...

There was a knock at the door around 11am and I received a small package containing some new bearings, followed a couple of hours afterwards by another knock and the delivery of a larger box containing a deck, some independent stage 10's and some bolts.

The skate fairy had paid me a visit, more details on this to follow in the next blog...

Having waited in the house until half past one in the afternoon, there was no chance that I was going to travel any real distance and as I had not yet received the wheels to accompany my new set-up, the best option for a skate today was to take the Vallely out.

Slight problem. After returning from Edinburgh in the car the day before, I had left said skateboard in it's boot and the vehicle in question was parked at my wife's place of work!

As I don't currently own a file I walked into town anyway to get one in order to grip my new deck.
In the meantime, I agreed to meet my wife and my son Kyle at the skatepark after he had come out of school. She went off to pick up his BMX and we rendezvoused a while later at the park.

My son Kyle attempting skateboarding for the first time.

Once Kyle and my trusty Vallely board arrived, I was anxious to get some filming done, so I took ten minutes out to get it done while Kyle rolled about on his bike. Once I had captured "the magic", I sat down and had a rest while Kyle surprised me by taking an interest in my board and trying it out for himself.

I had originally bought him a small set-up a few years back, he went through the obligatory sitting-down-and-messing-about phase, but soon lost interest. But, today was different. He tried to push himself standing up from the outset, and after a bit of coaching, he was rolling around and taking his first tentative steps to becoming a skateboarder.

He took to it very quickly and after figuring out how to roll around, he was keen to take it up a gear and hit the little street section behind the quarterpipe. I didn't get to skate again today, once he had the board, he was keeping it. "Good on him" I thought as I watched him skate.

He then surprised me by saying that he wanted a board of his own for his birthday which is coming up next month. So, after a long walk home we started looking on the internet for potential shredding machines for the wee guy.

I'm overwhelmed by all of this. It means we'll get to spend much more time together and it feels like I'm now leaving my mark on the world, a legacy of sorts.

For today's video I thought I should really take the time to get gnarly (well as gnarly as I can get anyway!), I thought I owed it to my board as it's going to be taking a back seat for a while. Frontside 50-50s and Bertlemans were the order of the day, with a bit of Kyle's first attempts at skateboarding thrown in...