Hockey gear at the ages of 7 and 8 essentially includes a dog crate that goes over your face, a neck guard that strangles you, a one-piece shoulder and chest protecter that adds about as much value to a group of kids that can't check or lift the puck off the ice as Wikipedia does to documenting the truth, a set of elbow pads that prevents you from bending your elbows, a pair of padded short pants that makes no sense for a game played in the winter, a pair of one-piece shin and knee guards that prevent you from bending your knees, a pair of skates whose unique sinister design is to inject your feet with pain no matter what size they are, a cane (called a hockey stick) that keeps you from keeling over, to be held with gloves whose finger holes are more to identify that they are indeed hands at the end of your arms than actually having any functional value.
Now, if you are a father with kids that will someday play hockey, or you aspire to someday be a hockey mom, you should pay careful attention to the following advice: before assembling this jigsaw puzzle of equipment it would be prudent to send your kids to the bathroom.
Halfway through the session Daniel came running off the ice, to the extent someone wearing the above can run. "I HAVE TO PEE!" he cried out with as much intensity as an infantryman yelling, "FIRE IN THE HOLE!"
We sprinted to the bathroom and now began the urgent task of disassembling Megatron. But there is no time; Daniel was running in place with me dodging the blades of his skates, he fumbled with his gloves first and then looked for a way to simply lower his pants, all while trying to squeeze his now oversized body into a stall designed for little children not wearing equipment that enlarged their body.
Somehow he managed to cast off his gloves without sending one into the toilet, reach deep down into the abyss of his hockey pants and pull out the working end of his urinary tract, swollen to capacity caused by his clamping grip, at an angle that I am thinking can only be corrected with surgery. Still stomping on his feet, in a far from dignifying stance he asked, "Can I go?"
"Let her rip!"
Well, you would have thought the entire stall was on fire as he peed all over the toilet seat, all over the (thankfully rubber) floor, and all over the walls. The only amazing part was he managed to keep himself and me unscathed.
With no real need to flush, and realizing we were the only ones in the bathroom, there was nothing left to do but put away the extinguisher and send him back onto the ice.
