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.