Making hockey fit

This post is part of YummyMummyClub.ca and Dodge Grand Caravan’s ”Tales from the Minivan” program. I received compensation as a thank you for my participation. This post reflects my personal opinion about the information provided by the sponsors.

There was freshly fallen snow that I didn’t take into account when I decided to walk the girls to Colum’s hockey game.

“You guys go ahead,” I croaked, standing over the coffee maker in my pajamas. “We’ll walk over in a little bit to catch the end of the game and then maybe we can go out for brunch.”

It must have been an 8:30am game time because I don’t even bother with the 7am games at all. Sorry kids. My love knows no limits but my tolerance for frigid hockey arenas on cold winter mornings is about as high as my expectation of ever seeing the Leaf’s win the Stanley Cup in my lifetime. That is to say, low.

So I let the guys go ahead and took my time getting the rest of us dressed and getting myself sufficiently caffeinated. All bundled up, I strapped the girls into the sit and stand-style double stroller and pushed it right into a snow drift in the back lane.

?#@*&%!

I managed to get some traction on a tire track and pushed and heaved that four-year-old bucket of rusty bolts down to the end of the lane. The main street was fairly clear so it was nice that we got to walk along it for all of two minutes before turning onto a smaller street. I was able to keep some momentum up along the sidewalk through force of sheer will. I was sweating under my winter coat by now and kept telling myself that this was better than the gym. Then we ran out of sidewalk. One street turns into another around a bend and I guess nobody put in a work order to connect the sidewalks of the two streets via, I don’t know, a sidewalk?!

Somehow we finally arrived at the hockey rink and I rushed the girls up the stairs to the stands, gasping for breath, just in time to hear the horn signal the end of the game. Fantastic.

Back down at the car, I was busy cramming three kids in winter coats and boots into the two car seats and a booster we have squeezed into the backseat. Ed tossed Colum’s hockey bag on top of his own that was left in the back after his shinny game the night before and slammed the door shut.

“Uh, babe?”

“Yeah?”

“There’s also that.” I pointed at the double stroller.

“Oh, for crying out …” And he opened the trunk, folded up the stroller and tried to just, maybe a little this way, how about the other, maybe if I tilt it … He couldn’t jam it in. Out came both hockey bags and whatever other assorted crap was floating around back there, so the stroller could like down flat and everything else stacked on top of it.

Okay! Good to go!

I opened the passenger-side door and scaled the side of the car until I was high enough to kind of side step and shimmy over the two hockey sticks that jutted out past my seat.

* * *

So hockey season is here again! And this year I will have two kids in hockey! And if I add enough exclamation points to my writing, I will sound really cheerful!

I actually am excited about Irene playing hockey. She’s naturally athletic and competitive and I think she will be great. I also want to encourage my girls to pursue physical activities that celebrate strength and skill without added body image pressures. The local hockey league has a girls-only practice that will help her fit in, Ed will coach the team and she has a pink helmet. What more could I want?

*cough cough* MINIVAN. *cough cough*

Okay, fine. You guys win. What do you want from me?

When Mary was first born and I could have earned an engineering degree fitting three car seats across in our backseat everybody kept saying, “Get a minivan.” But I was determined that we’d be just fine as long as we could fit the seats in. And we are just fine if fine means really, really cramped.

I didn’t even realize HOW MUCH MORE ROOM a minivan has until the good people at Chrysler were all, “Here, try this Dodge Grand Caravan out and see how your hockey gear fits.”

Holy crap. There are THREE entire hockey bags, three hockey sticks and a stroller in there and it’s not even crowded. This van has something called Stow ‘N Go seating that means there’s a reservoir below floor level in which to fold the seats for extra cargo space OR in which to stash your stuff. We could easily fit double the hockey equipment in this vehicle. In fact, the only drawback to owning this minivan is that you’d be tempted to give birth to an entire hockey team’s worth of players and then spend your life driving from tournament to tournament.

I mean, LOOK at how insanely spacious it is. There were other fancy features on the test model I got to try out, but mostly you want this van for the space. There’s extra storage in all three rows of seating, the Stow ‘N Go reservoirs in front of the second row and behind the third row. There also are fully automatic sliding doors with windows that roll down on both sides which my kids loved. And it’s loaded with every imaginable safety feature which is essential. It was easy to drive and I even squeezed it into our inner city, lane-parking spot without issue. Props to the Parkview Rear Backup camera that lets me see exactly where I am and beeps if I get too close anything. You can check out the Dodge Grand Caravan site for even more specs and features.

As for us, we loaded up the car with all the kids and hockey gear just before I realized that Canadian Tire was about to close for the night. They had a shelf on sale that I wanted to get so we swung over and threw it in the back.

How easy is that?

Back to school chaos, car pool etiquette, what to love about minivans … Find these stories and more on YMC’s “Tales from the Minivan” page. And to learn about the Dodge Grand Caravan visit dodge.ca/grandcaravan.