Hockey Mania

Nathan started hockey a few weeks ago. It's been a learning experience for both of us. On the first day, I forgot his stick, so he starting crying when everyone else started practicing with the puck and we left instead. I also flubbed the uniform assembly, by putting his kneepads on outside of pants with nothing over them. But I'm learning. I even found a youtube video that showed how to wrap his stick in tape so that it'd be easy to pick up with gloves on. I had one awful moment when I had to be a mean, threatening mommy to get him on the ice because he was feeling shy. But I knew that once he got out there, he'd have fun.

He's learning too. From the first day they've been drilling kids on stopping, getting to their knees and back up, and parallel turns. We're a month into things and they're doing work on passing and controlling the puck. The kids are between five & seven, some are in their second year, but most just had basic skating skills. Nathan has been skating well, but he doesn't know how to hold the stick. We think that although he's finally settled into being righty for writing, that he may be a lefty for sports. So Dan keeps showing him how to hold his stick for a lefty, but then the coaches keep switching it around on the ice. The picture below has him holding it completely wrong, but he's about to score a goal, so that's cool.

This weekend, the kids got to do a little show at the period break of the Clarkson U Men's game. We went on Friday with Papa and Clair in tow. Unfortunately, Clarkson's method for revving up the crowd before the game is to blow a giant train-like whistle as they introduce the starting line-up, with a noise assist by the pep band. Claire immediately went into hysterics, and her wail "I want my blankie" could be heard across the stadium in the silence before Au Canada started. I managed to get her into the lobby and calmed down, and cajoled her back into the stadium a few minutes before Nathan's show started, when Clarkson had the temerity to score and that fricken-fracken whistle blew again. She was able to calm down enough to watch Nathan, but as further proof of my bad luck, I discovered the camera had gotten too cold in the car during dinner, and wouldn't work to film the event. Oh well.
We had a second chance on Saturday. This time I left Claire with the grandparents, and we had fun watching the game for awhile too. I could even explain most of the rules to Nathan, and he loved it when the puck skimmed the glass right in front of us. He's decided Clarkson is his favorite team, which could be a problem with Dan who's been a St. Lawrence fan all his life. And here's the video of him skating around the arena and not coming anywhere near the puck for two minutes. He's #14. (There is a second #14 with striped socks who I started to follow, Nathan just has blue pants on)