Canadian Grudge Puck

Canadians love hockey.

I don’t know that we Americans can truly understand how deeply hockey is ingrained into the Canadian psyche. Probably the closest we come is the religious events that we here in the South call football games. Yes, the Super Bowl is routinely one of the most-watched television events of the year, but for many of the viewers it’s as much of a social event as a sporting one.

Hockey is different. Hockey is in the Canadian blood. Little Canadian girls play hockey and little Canadian boys play hockey and then the two grow up and have babies that learn to skate at the same time they are learning to walk. The entire country expects both the men’s and women’s hockey teams to take gold in these Olympics.

So imagine the shock to the Canadians this past weekend when the American hockey team beat the Canadians 5-3. The game-winning goal came against an unguarded net. At first I thought the goalie had simply been pulled away from the net in a puck-control skirmish, but then it was explained to me that taking the goalie out of the game is a strategic measure used in times of desperation. A team replaces the goalie with a sixth skater in an effort to outman the other team's goalie. It gives the goalie-less team a better chance of scoring. But sometimes it backfires.

It backfired on Canada. Taking out the Canadian goalie gave an American a chance to make a haphazard shot, one that shouldn't have worked. But it did.

I believe Canadians collectively did a national face-palm at that moment.

The US went on to get one more goal just for good measure and at the final buzzer, the tally was US 5, Canada 3. It was eerily quiet in the hockey stadium. If you’ve never seen a full-house hockey stadium go quiet, I’ll tell you – it’s downright spooky.

I tell you all of this so you’ll understand a little more when I tell you about the Canadian/German hockey game. The initial games are over and now we are moving on to the serious stuff—the quarterfinals, semifinals and finals which will determine gold, silver and bronze medals. Because of our victory the other night, the US got an automatic spot in the quarterfinals. Canada, however, had an elimination game with Germany before they could get to the quarterfinals. The Canadians were mad. And the Germans were in their way.

I’m positive that this was the first and only time in the existence of these two nations that Germany feared Canada.

Canada beat Germany 8 – 2. It was 8 – 1 until the last few minutes when Germany happened to score a second goal. The Canucks had a grudge and they were taking it out on Germany.

If the unthinkable were to happen, and the US were to wind up beating Canada for a second time on their home turf and taking the gold (or knocking Canada out of gold contention) it could spell the end of peaceful diplomatic relations with our neighbors to the north. Political scientists 200 years from now would study the Great Hockey Disaster of 2010 and how it affected international alliances for decades afterwards.

So in the interest of world peace, or at least North America peace, let’s all root for Canadian hockey. Go Canada!

Gold Medal Mamas

More reason to love curling -- It's a family sport!

Quite literally, in the case of Canadian curler Kristie Moore who is 5 1/2 months pregnant. (There's a joke waiting to be made about how she needs to check into the products offered by the USA Curling sponsors, but I'm going to take the high road and not go there :-)

Can you imagine the story she'll have to tell her little one? "You were at the Olympics with Mama when we won the gold."

How many times can you say that has happened?

OK, so the article gives you the answer to that question... This is only the second known time an athlete has competed in the Olympics while in the family way. In 1920 Swedish figure skater Magda Julin won gold while three months pregnant.

So, best of luck ot Kristie, her teammates and her little curler-in-training. Maybe we'll be watching him or her curling in the 2030 Winter Olympic Games.

Awesome Olympic Sponsor

I love the Olympics. The pageantry, the glory...the sponsorships. Nothing can get me crying faster than a well-crafted, heart-string-pulling commercial about the trials and perseverance of Olympic athletes.

So...I submit for your approval...possibly the strangest, yet most strangely compelling sponsorship of the 2010 Olympics. Don't hesitate to get your Official Condom of the US Curling Team.

If that's not a reason in and of itself to love curling, what is?

A Rose by Any Other Name . . .

So...I think I made my child's daycare teacher a little uncomfortable this morning...

Let me begin by explaining that we taught The Punkin the proper word for her vagina. There's several reasons we did this, but to sum it up: we call an arm an arm and a leg a leg, why should we make up words for other parts of the body?

Also pertinent to the story, we have a new teacher at daycare. The Punkin moved up to the three year old class last week. So we're still breaking her in (whether that refers to The Punkin or The Teacher, you can decide :-)

Well, this morning The Punkin told me that her 'gina hurt. Lovely. She's had some problems with her bowel movements the last couple of weeks, please don't let her be getting a bladder infection, too.

So when I dropped her off at daycare the teacher asked if she was still 'running off' -- that's a colloquialism for diarrhea -- and I said it was coming and going. Then I told her what The Punkin had said that morning: "My 'gina hurts." I asked her if she'd just make a note if The Punkin told her that today when she went to the bathroom.

As I was saying "I hope she's not getting a bladder infection, too" the teacher's eyes got wide and she took a step back. Hmmm, she must be a germaphobe, I thought to myself.

Nope. Turns out it was not the loose bowels, potential bladder infection and lingering cough from a recent bout of croup that was getting to her. It was the fact that our 2-almost-3-year-old knew the word vagina.

"Oh, oh, I don't want to hear the bad word," she said.

"Bad word?" I asked, confused because I still thought this was about bladder infections.

Nope, the bad word was Vagina.

Now, I knew we would eventually encounter some resistence for teaching The Punkin to say vagina, but this is not the form I thought it would take. I figured we'd be talking to the teacher because The Punkin had taught another kid to say it and that kid's mom hadn't taken too kindly to the added vocabulary. But I had not expected to hear a grown woman call it A Bad Word.

Now I guess I'm going to have to rehearse the speech about Vagina-Is-Not-a-Bad-Word,-It-Just-Makes-Some-Adults-Uncomfortable-So-Let's-Just-Use-It-at-Home-and-the-Doctor's-Office-But-Not-at-School. I knew I'd be telling her this someday, I just didn't think it would be for this reason. Or so soon.

I suppose we'll have that talk tonight. I want to be proactive about it because I don't want her to use it repeatedly at school and then her teacher put the idea in her head that it's a bad word. There are plenty of tacky, vulgar and classless ways to refer to a woman's genitalia. Vagina is not one of them. Let's not be ashamed to give it a name.

Vagina, Vagina, Vagina

UPDATE: After some thought about this, I decided not to bring it up yet. The Punkin doesn't use the word often enough that I think it will be a problem with her Teacher. And I can't see the Teacher calling it a Bad Word unless The Punkin is using it a lot. So I'm not going to make it a problem until it becomes a problem.

Croup is a Bitch

Croup is a bitch. She's a bitch that sneaks into your house in the middle of the night and closes up your child's airways so that you are awoken at 3:30 a.m. to the tell-tell sound of a barking cough coming from the baby's room. If you've been around someone with croup, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't heard it before, once you do hear it you will instantly know what it is.

Croup almost always starts in the night; it almost always sounds better during the day; but it's 100% always scary. It's scary when your child coughs and sounds more like an animal than a baby. It's scary when their coughing makes them cry. And it's even scarier when they wheeze as they inhale. Let me repeat: croup is a bitch.

I'm grateful I live in a time and place where a quick trip to the doctor's office will yield a prescription for steriods that will take down the swelling and return breathing to normal. I try not to be the momma who's always rushing to the doctor's office. (Well, once I got past the first 18 months of momma-hood, I try not to be, but that's another blog altogether.) I'll wait out a fever for a couple of days and I'll let loose stools go for close to two weeks before we call. But I don't mess with the croup. This is the third time in three years that we've had it and my rule is: you wake up with the croup and momma's calling the doctor. (But now, I do wait until the office opens, but again, another blog.)

So now, we've had a dose of medicine at the doctor's office and the rest is waiting to be picked up at the pharmacy this afternoon. Hopefully, we'll have a more restful night tonight. And hopefully croup will go away and stay far, far away for a long time.