The difference a year can make, or six months anyway.

I’ve noted on a number of occasions that the boy hated hockey at the end of last year. It was due in part to a burgeoning, somewhat unfriendly, rivalry with another player and also to the fact that his skill development stagnated a bit; though, I doubt the boy would admit as much.

At this point, and it’s still early days for hockey, the boy has been enjoying the experience much more. Most interesting about this state of affairs is that the rivalry that had developed last year has continued thus far. The boy shared with me that the other kid is still taking shots at him whenever he can, knocking him down or tripping him with his stick.

The boy’s plan for dealing with the kid? Nothing. “It’s not worth it,” he told me.

He’ll occasionally retaliate by tripping him when he knows the coaches aren’t looking, but by and large he expects it now and has prepared himself. He tries extra hard not to go down, or he sees the kid coming and skates away from him. One thing I’ve noticed about the boy’s skating is that it’s improved tremendously, he’s very maneuverable, able to make sharp turns at speed, and quite fast on the ice. My guess is he can out skate the other kid. He’s also the other kid’s equal in terms of size, so he’s not intimidated by him. The fact that he takes his shots when he deems it possible speaks to that as well.

What strikes me as most promising is that he isn’t letting these circumstances cloud his playing experience this year. In yesterday’s game, he took it upon himself to help his team by playing defense and they ended up winning easily. Having not actually seen the game, I can’t say for sure about the cause and effect, but that he was willing to take responsibility for an aspect of his team’s performance was a pleasant surprise. Contrast that with last year, where he spent most of his time simply skating around the ice, seemingly uninterested in the game going on around him.

With the games worked into the schedule now, the opportunities for confrontations will diminish and that should help him even more. If he continues having success, then we’ll be well on our way to a much different ending to this year’s hockey season than last year.

When the boy was still an infant, one of the Wife’s friends crocheted a blanket for him. It’s a small blanket, though at the time it was big enough for him to be covered up by it. But it wasn’t quite big enough to swaddle him in.

It became his favorite blanket, despite a number of other potential candidates including a couple his Grandmother had made (those were big enough to swaddle him in). Blankets with Sesame Street characters and Super Heroes on them all fell be the wayside to this simple, light green blanket.

Now, this wasn’t a “Linus” blanket. He didn’t carry it with him everywhere he went. Though when he was younger, if he was found napping, “Green”, as he came to call it, was often clutched in one of his hands. He would bring it along for long trips and, as he got a older, it was his goto companion when he went to sleep.

When the boy turned 5, I argued with the Wife that we should remove the blanket from him. It was, in my view, the equivalent of a pacifier and I felt he was getting too old to be dependent on something like that. She countered that he really only slept with it, that it basically stayed on his bed and we should let him out grow it on his own. I grumbled something to the effect of how long would we wait for him to give it up? Until he’s 10? or 13? It wasn’t going to be easy either way. I lost that argument and the boy kept his blanket with him. I kept my feelings to myself for the most part. The Wife knew, but I never mentioned anything to the boy.

Then, this week, he decided to put it in a drawer in his dresser. When I put him to bed last night, he asked me “Do you see anything that’s missing, Dad? I’ll give you a hint, it starts with ‘G’.” He then showed me how he’d neatly folded it up and placed it in a drawer in the dresser I’d made him. It was a drawer that he used for other keepsakes as well.

Curious, I asked him what had prompted the change. The boy shrugged his shoulders and said he “didn’t want to be a baby anymore.” He further elaborated that it was a little embarrassing when he had friends over and the blanket was still there. He figured he was old enough that it was time to put it away.

Despite my own feelings about the blanket, which admittedly had only intensified as he’s gotten older, I winced a bit internally when he mentioned how the blanket embarrassed him. It was a long fall from grace for something that had held such high status for so long. But sometimes, that’s the way of it.

He gave the blanket a final look before closing the drawer. Then, he climbed into bed. I noticed that his hand made a strange motion, as if clutching for something it expected to be there. The boy looked at me and grinned sheepishly, his expression asking me a question that most kids ask their parents at one point or another: Did I do the right thing?

I said “Goodnight” to him, then gave him a hug and kiss. My final thought before I turned out the light was “It’s just a blanket.”

One of the local towns had a parade this weekend to kickoff the Christmas season. Cheerily titled “The Holiday Dazzle Light Parade” I’ve dutifully watched it from the sidelines for the past several years. I say “dutifully” because of all the things I’d like to be doing, parade watching it way down there on the list. Actually, it might not even be on the list.

But that’s just me.

The Wife has a much different view of parades, as do both of the kids putting my firmly in the minority on the matter. Thus, each year I do my duty.

Being the Cub Master for our Cub Scout Pack, I got a different view of the parade this year. I marched in it along side the boy. Or, I should say, with the boy. He was handing out candy initially and, when he exhausted his supply, he rode on the float that a couple of Moms in the Pack put together for the occasion.

The different view was an improvement over the prior one, since, give the choice, I’d rather be doing something and walking the parade route, monitoring kids definitely counts as something.

But it also gave me a chance to realize something that I think every parent knows, but finds it difficult to put into practice. We want to expose kids to different experiences. But those experiences are often filtered through the ones that we, the parents as people, prefer thereby denying a lot of different opportunities or experiences to our kids. Given a choice between a parade and, say, a day of woodworking, for me, there is no choice. Give me the wood and saw any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

I think it’s largely natural for us (parents) to do this. Our most stretched resource is time and given a choice most of us would rather spend it doing something we enjoy that we can share with our kids. Thus, family traditions are propagated down through the generations. Also, I’ve found that as a parent there kind of a “stride” that we hit or a rhythm to our life where we rotate through a set of activities that are all similar but different. Striking out and doing something really different just doesn’t come to mind.

It’s easy to forget that, even though they’re our kids, they are not us. While they’ll likely enjoy the stuff we choose to do with them, there’s little reasons to suspect that they won’t enjoy other things that we might never think to do, like participate in a parade. The boy had a blast doing it and I suspect he’ll want to do it again next year.

And that will be fine. Even with admitting I had some fun this year, I still don’t particularly care for parades; but that doesn’t mean the boy has to.