Silly season is about to end

This coming weekend are hockey playoffs.

Sam – who isn’t advanced enough to have play-offs – has his last practice at 7:am Saturday. Kamryn has a game at 9:00 am and then again at the same time on Sunday and one last game at 5:00 pm Sunday night. Her two Sunday games are at one of the very few arenas not in our immediate neighbourhood. I don’t have much to complain about on average we drive 15 minutes to a game. In this case the drive is about a half hour. Nevertheless, I’m spoilt and it seems a pain. This particular arena is in the middle of absolutely nowhere. We don’t live that far from nowhere! Actually we live extremely close to nowhere but have to drive through somewhere to get to nowhere again. What it means is that we can’t go play the game, grab some lunch, run some errands and then pop back for the last game. It will be a ½ drive out there a ½ drive back x2. An awful waste of time and gas. Four hockey “events.” One weekend – or non-weekend as the case will be. Still… it means that hockey season is almost over. Do the dance of joy!

I had fun this year. I didn’t think I would. I was prepared to hate the other hockey parents. But they were nice – for the most part I liked them. Although I must admit to not connecting very well with the parents on Sam’s team. His team is BIG (so hard to meet people consistently anyways) and the kids on his team… most of them…well… they’re going to be Good (I capitalized the G on purpose) or at least their parents assume they are going to be good. His team are the “top-ranked” (hilarious) 5 year-olds on skates in our district (this means they can skate without falling down… most of the time). Some of the parents are WAY to into hockey for my liking. One kid is the grandson of some hall-of-famer. He is an amazing little hockey player but his mother… she has to learn some humility. Sam isn’t that far behind this kid in skills (and has really caught up as the year progressed) and I’ve managed to keep my hat size down.

Manager Mom has told me that I’m likely in for a ride with Sam as the parents only get worse as the kids get older and the teams more competitive. Ugh! This summer Kamryn is going to do a power skating course to help her improve her skills a little. We purposefully didn’t sign Sam up. I’m considering having his legs casted all summer to further handicap him before Fall skating evaluations. Our goal – two years down the road is for him not to make A hockey. He needs to play B for his parents’ sanity. He’s already too good for C (he plays better than many of the 7 year olds on Kamryn’s team right now).

He is something to watch though. If only I didn’t have to deal with the parents of all the little Sydney Crosby’s out there. I had the chance to go and watch Sam play soccer a few weekends ago (normally I’m tied up with hockey and miss his games). I must say: soccer parents – not much better. I was really surprised. Who knew that athletic talent could make people so catty.

Anyway, I’m so looking forward to having our weekends back. We will drop from Soccer, Hockey and Piano lessons to just Piano lessons. That will last until mid-May when we’ll add in a Saturday morning soccer practice for both kids. Piano lessons should end around that time. It’s going to be heavenly.

I’m hyper critical of over-scheduled kids and we’ve always had strict rules to guard against this descent into insanity. I don’t know how we ended up here.