First Hockey Game

On Friday night we took Ben to his first Hockey game, or, at least he first one he has any chance of remembering at all.

He did NOT want to go. He wanted to throw a big fit and stay home. But, we persisted. We wanted it to be HIS night. He made that a bit hard because he was asleep for the beginning of it, and very grumpy, but eventually he caught on. We took him to Perkin's for dinner so he could get breakfast food, which he loved. Then onto the hockey game. He was mesmerized as soon as we walked in, loved going through the skywalk, loved the atmosphere, loved the bleacher seating. There was a lot of empty space and he could run around.

When the game started, he watched pretty closely for the first 8 minutes or so of play, even craning his neck to see around other people. He liked the checking. Then he started to get restless and we moved to a less crowded section so he could move around more. He loved when UMD scored goals. We were really not sure how much he was following, but shortly after a goal got disallowed I was explaining how to read the scoreboard and he caught the difference ("2? I thought we scored 3 goals!"). We stayed until the end of the 2nd period, he was looking more and more tired and less and less interested. As we were leaving he said "Maybe you can watch the rest of the game on TV while I am in bed and when it is over come up and tell me if we won" and " maybe some time after my next birthday, after my five birthday, we can come back here and I can play hockey". It was adorable that he was so interested!

Really, the biggest and best outcome of the night was that we showed him it can be fun to root for a a good team! The atmosphere- the band playing, people screaming, jumping up and down, totally got him hooked. Maybe eventually we can translate to rooting for good guys in movies and fiction....