Abby and Ally's first trip to Vertical Escape 2/21/10

The girls (Abby especially) have been begging me to go climbing lately and I took Jack skiing the day before so I decided to finally take them to VX. They were so excited and were so cute in the little full-body harnesses. Abby needed the smallest shoes they had and Ally needed one size larger. It had been over 6 months since I was last there, so I had to go through a safety refresher course. I was glad because I really couldn't remember how it worked and wanted to make sure I was doing everything safely for my girls. Abby was the first to go and she was awesome! She only made it up a few feet before coming back down but I was impressed at how well she got the hang of it. The hand-holds are meant for adults so they are pretty far apart and were hard for them to use, but they did great and were able to stretch when they needed to. Ally went next and she did great too but she didn't have the strength as Abby so she couldn't go very high. But she did not get scared at all like Jack did his first time so I was very proud of them for that. They each went about 15-20 times and we were there for a couple of hours. Abby was able to climb to the top of the small section near the front and ring the bell, so that was pretty exciting! I had a couple of people ask me how old she was because she looked so little when she was 20 feet up on a wall. I think this might be something Abby does more often because she really seems to get excited before her turn and was just so good and fast at finding the footholds and moving her body up the wall. We knew she was a climber, but I think she might really be good at this some day. They were having a big competition the next day and the owner said it was open to kids as young as 4, so maybe we'll keep practicing and try to enter that next year. Anyway, I really enjoyed my time with the girls and really enjoyed getting them out to do a good activity. I really want to continue doing stuff like that with them and hopefully climbing will be one more activity we enjoy doing together.