Category Archives: Family News

Kids Hockey Update

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While Jordy is busy working out and practicing for her role on the biathlon team for her Cadet Corps (I’m fairly sure I might eventually regret training a teenager how to ski and shoot a gun at the same time, but that’s another story altogether), the boys spend their weekends playing hockey.  Lots of hockey. I might have mentioned this before, but it’s something you have to really experience to understand how much time this all takes.  The best part of it is that it’s a really fun thing to do, and the boys frigging love it.

This is Quinn’s second year in hockey and he’s doing fantastically well for a kid that learned to skate at the beginning of last year.  Really well.  So well in fact that the coach recently contacted me to ask if I was interested in Quinn being “affiliated” with a Novice C team.  Affiliated in this sense means “we noticed that you aren’t spending enough time at a hockey rink every weekend and are going to fix that”.  We are Novice C Development at the moment, and it seems that the reward for doing really well in hockey is: much more hockey.  Wow.  Needless to say, I’m pretty much bursting with pride over this.  We haven’t started the extra practices yet, but stay tuned for further posts about this to come.  Still haven’t figured out just how the heck we are going to physically and mentally get to do all of this hockey, but we will figure it out somehow.

As for Cael, well you could say that he is, ah, uniquely positioned to have a fairly bright future in minor hockey if he decides to pursue it.  He is in Initiation-level hockey, the age of the kids is in the 5 to 6 range.  Cael of course has two things going for him in this situation.  First, his birthday places him as one of the oldest kids on the team.  As for the second advantage, I will leave it to you to see if you can figure out what it is from this blurry iPhone pic.

Yes.  It’s the fact that he has orange skate laces.  Never mind the kid beside him with the red laces, those won’t help.

Also, it seems that there might be another advantage in the fact that the entire team EXCEPT for Cael was caught in a gamma ray that has caused them to shrink a little more each week.  Very tragic, as you can see Cael is the only normal-sized child on the whole team.  He regularly packs the entire team into his hockey bag for fun and carries them out of the dressing room, to everyone’s amusement.

Seriously, what the heck am I going to do with this kid?  I can literally see other hockey dads look at him and cringe a little as they mentally imagine what might happen when these kids manage to develop some speed on their skates and they accidentally tangle with the Caelstrom.  It’s not going to be pretty.

Frugal Living

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The Scottish blood in me (I think there’s Scottish blood in there) abhors wasting money.  It’s not that I’m cheap, it’s just…. I’m cheap.  I’m sure I drive the kids and Nikki nuts with my ways.  I’m a big “turn that off” guy, just like your dad was when you were young.  Five humans live in our house, that means there are a LOT of (like, at least 35 or so) very dexterous fingers that can turn electric devices on.  Having electric things on means that there is a steady drip of money leaking out of my wallet until the darn things are turned off.  Televisions, game consoles, computers (ok, so most of these are mine, and some can’t be turned off for very important reasons, but roll with me here), lights, fans, electric toothbrushes, toasters, grills, mixers, phonographs, food processors, hair dryers, curling irons, hair straighteners, humidifiers, de-humidifiers, and toys of all shapes and sizes are constantly powered on, sucking electrons from the grid at a rate that makes me weak and fluttery just thinking about it.  It’s not even about the environment, or the 7 hectares of virgin rain forest they bulldozed last week just for our house alone, it’s all about the cash, people.  I’m a selfish, selfish man.  If I can also save the world by being the “turn that off” guy, then great.  But that’s not my main goal here. I’m trying to find a way to retire before I’m dead.

But I digress.  I’m not here to talk about electricity.  I’m here to talk about lunch kits.  For various reasons we are historically unable to purchase, and retain lunch kits.  Cael is the only member of our family that has a perfect track record with lunch kits, he is still using his from last year and it’s mostly still in one piece.  So, for the rest of the family we have been using recycled grocery bags to carry lunches around.  Not the most environmentally friendly option, I know.  But at least up until now we had a readily available supply of these things.  No longer, as the closet supply has finally been exhausted.  We didn’t know it at the time, but we reached “peak bag” about a month ago, when our supply started dwindling rapidly due to using enviro bags to do our groceries all of the time.

Anyway, I was recently complaining about the lack of a mainstream lunch transport mechanism (i.e. lunch kit) solution and mentioned to Nikki that we were out of grocery bags.  She brightly suggested that we use doggy bags for the kids lunches, since they are biodegradable after all.

Hm.

Picture for a moment what it would be like (particularly, the teacher’s expression) to plop a black bag tied at the top containing lumpy shapes onto your desk at school, tear that sucker open and then start eating the contents.

I decided right then that while new lunch kits for the family might be an extravagance, we could probably swing it this month.

First Choice

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Overheard last night while the boys were getting a haircut.  Nikki took the lads to Goobers, but it was too busy, so they went to First Choice instead.  Quinn wasn’t too keen on getting his mop of hair handled.

Quinn: First Choice?  More like second choice…

Nikki: Oh yeah?  More like No Choice, buddy.

Har har.  The family is much like living with a bunch of comedians….  For the record, Cael got the “Bieber“.  Also, this whole story is Nikki’s, not mine.

Cael Does Comedy

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I try to keep things balanced here on the blog so that when I do a post about the kids there is something about everyone.  Since the blog is the only online search-able record of some of the things we do, it only seems fair.  I do have to make an exception this morning however since it seems that Cael has been on a roll lately.  There have been some Facebook status updates and other conversations, but I wanted to capture some of this stuff here so we wouldn’t forget.

We were having dinner and out of the usual dinner noise and simultaneous conversations we all suddenly heard Cael say to Quinn:  “Good thing that didn’t hit me in the juice sack.”

Nikki and I immediately stop and turn to him.  “What?”
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Let’s see, I’ll take death by asteroid impact.

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I’m loving this short post about the common worries that parents have with regards to their kids, and contrasted against the real dangers that exist. 

Based on surveys Barnes collected, the top five worries of parents are, in order:

  1. Kidnapping
  2. School snipers
  3. Terrorists
  4. Dangerous strangers
  5. Drugs

But how do children really get hurt or killed?

  1. Car accidents
  2. Homicide (usually committed by a person who knows the child, not a stranger)
  3. Abuse
  4. Suicide
  5. Drowning

I will readily admit that I have personally had some of these worries from time to time, but the rational part of my brain shouts out and says that’s really stupid.  Usually I listen, because I like to think I’m a rational person.  It’s a difficult voice to ignore, there must be some sort of wiring in my head that makes it so.  One commenter on this post pretty much nails it:

If we were any good at assessing risk, then we would kiss the ground when the taxi dropped us off at the airport instead of clutching the armrest at takeoff.

It’s amazing that we even have these worries, because really how many direct experiences have I had that even come close to any of these?  None.  We are so good at projecting other’s fears onto ourselves that just a news story is enough to chill our souls and instill fear even when the odds are long, long, long of any such thing happening to us.  In fact, I thought it might be fun to look up the odds of death of some regularly occurring nightmares (for some folk).

Heart Disease
 1-in-5
 
Cancer
 1-in-7
 
Stroke
 1-in-23
 
Accidental Injury
 1-in-36
 
Motor Vehicle Accident*
 1-in-100
 
Intentional Self-harm (suicide)
 1-in-121
 
Falling Down
 1-in-246
 
Assault by Firearm
 1-in-325
 
Fire or Smoke
 1-in-1,116
 
Natural Forces (heat, cold, storms, quakes, etc.)
 1-in-3,357
 
Electrocution*
 1-in-5,000
 
Drowning
 1-in-8,942
 
Air Travel Accident*
 1-in-20,000
 
Flood* (included also in Natural Forces above)
 1-in-30,000
 
Legal Execution
 1-in-58,618
 
Tornado* (included also in Natural Forces above)
 1-in-60,000
 
Lightning Strike (included also in Natural Forces above)
 1-in-83,930
 
Snake, Bee or other Venomous Bite or Sting*
 1-in-100,000
 
Earthquake (included also in Natural Forces above)
 1-in-131,890
 
Dog Attack
 1-in-147,717
 
Asteroid Impact*
 1-in-200,000**
 
Tsunami*
1-in-500,000

Fireworks Discharge
1-in-615,488

 
Finally, just to really quench the good vibes and optimism you had about the odds being that nothing really horrendous will happen to you, the odds of winning the jackpot in Lotto 6/49?

1 in 13,983,816

Crap.

The Tale of Lloyd and The Invisible Fence

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Allow me to regale you with a tale today.  The tale of Lloyd and the Invisible Fence.

We are very lucky to have relatively unspoiled greenspace directly adjacent to our backyard, and a park on one side of our property.  This means we only have one direct neighbour, and we get along just fine so we long ago decided to not build a fence in our backyard.  We reasoned that this would spoil our view, and limit our access to nature, not to mention probably reduce our usable backyard since I mow a rather, ah, generous area not technically belonging to me.  The kids and Harvey enjoyed a relatively large yard for a long time.  Fast forward ten years and here comes Lloyd.  As a fairly boisterous puppy, Lloyd was not overly concerned with things like legal property lines, the limits of our neighbour’s patience, and the amount of effort it takes to bath a St. Bernard after swimming in the Carp river.  Needless to say Nikki and I had agreed that we would get an invisible fence as soon as we could afford to (they aren’t terribly cheap).  This would satisfy our need to contain our dogs, while maintaining the fence-less backyard we love so much.

A quick web search and phone call and we were connected with our local dealer, who assured us the fence would work perfectly.  Installation day came, and we were presented with a disconcerting amount of information about how to train your dog to live with the fence.  This was news to us, but we faithfully followed the instructions and we trained both dogs to respect the little flags as a boundary (before wearing the shock collars).  It went very well, really, since Lloyd and Harvey are actually easily trainable.  Finally we worked our way to the day when we would test the actual shocking part of the shock collar.  Harvey learned his lesson in about 3/10ths of a second, and we were done with him.  Never since has Harvey even gone near the edge of our property, whether he had his collar on or not.  Job done on that dog.

Lloyd was another matter altogether.  While Lloyd easily understood that we did not want him to cross the flags, this understanding was only out of convenience as we soon found out.  He seemed unable to notice the collar when it was shocking him.  Literally, he would often stand directly in the field and casually take a leak while the collar was shocking him with the maximum voltage it could generate.  I could tell the collar was working because his jowls were twitching in time to the zapping sound, much like one of those muscle conditioning machines you see on the informercials.  Lloyd would soon be the only St. Bernard with a six pack on his jowls.  We tried shaving him.  He galloped joyously through the field at will and the Carp river smell permeated our household. He was oblivious, and we had a problem.

A call to the fence guy and he explained that he had never had this problem before, but there was a different type of collar he could order in for us to try.  We waited, and it finally came.  It was rather more formidable than the regular collar, with electrodes that made contact at the sides of Lloyd’s neck instead of together at the front.  The thinking here is the more meat the current has to pass through, the much more uncomfortable it will be.  I gleefully (by now more than a little tired of the problem, and the baths) tried to put in on him, it barely fit his neck on the last hole, but I squished it on and we used it for a few days to test it out.  There was no evidence that Lloyd could even tell that this leather torture device was frantically discharging itself into his neck.

Crap.

Another phone call to the fence guy, and he was even more incredulous.  He had to come and see it for himself.  So, we arranged a test and sure enough Lloyd couldn’t tell where the fence was, while Harvey was wetting himself trying to climb the siding on the house from the sound Lloyd’s collar was making.  The fence guy turns to me and says, ok, listen, why don’t you try putting two collars on him?

Folks, I am an animal lover, and I don’t abide cruelty of any kind.  It was only because I was so absolutely, resignedly sure of the outcome that I agreed, and we started to put two shock collars on Lloyd when he went out, which by any rights would be Freaking Painful to a normal animal.

On Canada Day Lloyd made a joyous spontaneous unscheduled swim trip to the Carp River while wearing two collars at the same time, and I left a message on Monday for the fence guy to come and get his fence and give me my money back.  I have yet to hear from him….

Lloyd is clearly unable to determine the subtleties of an invisible fence, no doubt he’s more of a physical fence kind of dog.  We will have to go back to the drawing board on this one.