10 tips for restaurant dining with teams or first, you confiscate the salt shakers
Posted: November 14, 2012 Filed under: Parenting, Sports, Tips, Uncategorized, youth sports | Tags: eating, food, restaurants, sports tradition, stink eye, team dinners 4 Comments »
A time honored youth sports tradition is the whole team dinner outing. Take 15 or so sweaty, hyperactive kids and a bunch of parents who just want to go someplace warm (or cool) and sit down, cram them into a busy, understaffed restaurant and you’ll learn a lot about the make up of your team. Like which parent completely ignores their little sweetheart, who just squirted mustard into a teammate’s drink. Or which parent is rude to serving staff. And which parent you can split a pizza with because they totally hate mushrooms, too.
Team dining can be a lot of fun and a great bonding experience, but it can be disastrous if you don’t know what you’re doing. So, take some advice from The Trophy Mom, survivor of many team dinners, and former truck stop waitress (yes, folks, the sass is legit) before your entourage heads out to dine. Read the rest of this entry »
Didn’t think these activities were mutually exclusive.
Posted: November 6, 2012 Filed under: Sports, youth sports | Tags: 2012, community, election, hockey, precinct, president, vote Leave a comment »
This is what happens when your voting precinct is the ice rink.
The Car Cone of Silence
Posted: November 1, 2012 Filed under: Parenting, Sports, Tips, Uncategorized, youth sports | Tags: cone of silence, frustration, sports, sportsmanship, vent 7 Comments »I had a boss who once said that it is every employee’s inalienable right to bitch about their boss. It shouldn’t be held against either party, it doesn’t mean that you don’t buy in to the boss’s system, or you aren’t a team player, or anything like that. It just means that sometimes, your boss cheeses you off and you’ve got to vent. (This is the same boss that gave me a weekend off to attend the USA Hockey Level 4 Coaching Symposium so you know he’s a cool dude.)
The same thing applies to kids. Sometimes, a kid just has to vent– about a coach, about a teammate, about a bad call, a bad play or a bad bounce. And that’s okay. I think we get so caught up in the whole positive parenting, positive attitude thing that sometimes we forget to acknowledge that kids have frustrations, anger and disappointments, and they need a safe place to express those feelings. A place where it’s not directed at a coach, teammate, or official. A place where kids can blow off some steam and know that it won’t go any further, won’t hurt anyone’s feelings, and won’t undermine a coach or a teammate. We have found that place. We call it the Car Cone of Silence. Read the rest of this entry »
Product Review: Defense Sport
Posted: October 19, 2012 Filed under: Review, Sports, youth sports | Tags: cleaner, defense sport, disgusting, germs, gross, moms team, mouth guard, sanitize Leave a comment »
Ok, I am sort of embarrassed to admit this but it’s instrumental to the review so I’m just going to put it out there and you can all look at me with a shaming look next time you see me. See, here’s the thing. I wear a mouth guard when I play hockey. (My kids wear mouth guards, too, because it’s the league rule and it’s The Mom Rule.) And after the game, I take my mouth guard out and I STICK IT RIGHT BACK IN THE PLASTIC CASE. Sometimes it gets a cursory squirt from a water bottle. Many times, not.
That’s pretty gross, I know. Every once in a while (translation: a couple times a season), I scrub it with a toothbrush and some Crest. But that’s it. And then, I leave it in the case all week and stick it right back in my mouth the next game. Ewww. I’m grossing myself out!
When Defense Sport contacted me about reviewing their product, an anti-microbial mouth guard cleaner, I wondered if someone on my team had contacted them, like a mouthguard version of What Not To Wear. I quickly agreed to test it and Defense Sport sent me a free bottle to try out.
Sock it to me! Oh, what to do with all those hockey socks.
Posted: October 10, 2012 Filed under: Parenting, Review, Sports, Uncategorized | Tags: craft, cushion, hockey socks, laptop sleeve, recycle, reuse 6 Comments »If you’ve had a hockey player in the house for any length of time, you are probably in danger of being buried by hockey socks. These innocuous tubes of knit polyester appear to be completely harmless, yet seem to have the reproductive capability of rabbits. Seriously. Hockey socks spontaneously generate in our locker room, appearing in colors unworn by any of our teams, in singles and in pairs, threatening to disrupt the natural ecosystem like so many Asian carp.
As the old saying goes, when life gives you hockey socks, make, uh, make other stuff. Reduce, reuse, recycle, right? With just a little imagination, you’ll find that hockey socks have a multitude of uses that have absolutely nothing to do with hockey or socks. I think it goes without saying that you should wash the socks first, but there, I said it anyway. Here are a few of our favorites: Read the rest of this entry »
