In honour of the Senators making the playoffs, we bought Captain Jelly Belly a little Senators t-shirt. He’s been watching the hockey with his dad, and he’s really interested in it. He calls the Senators the “Canada team” because he understands that we root for them because they are from the place where we live, and to him, that place is Canada.

Last week, when we were watching a playoff game, CJB was full of questions and we tried our best to answer them. But it did get tiresome when he started asking, every 30 seconds or so, if the Canada Team had scored. So we taught him to recognise the signs of a score — a horn sounding, followed by lots and lots of hugging. Luckily, it was a high scoring game (for the Sens), so we had lots of opportunity to say, “Look CJB! See the hugging! That means we scored!”

I told CJB that the Senators are playing tonight, and he got pretty excited and ran to get his t-shirt to put on. Then we started playing a game of his own invention, where he, Gal Smiley, and I pretend to be Canada Team players, and whenever CJB yells out, “I scored!”, we all ran together for a hug. As games go, I think that’s a pretty good one.

After several minutes, in which it was clear that the Canada Team was way out in front (6 goals to 1), CJB came over and we had this conversation:

CJB: I have good news, and I have bad news.
Me: Okay, what’s the good news?
CJB: Our team got the most scores.
Me: That’s great! What could be the bad news?
CJB: The other team won the game.
Me: But how is that possible, since we got the most goals?
CJB: Well, they did more hugging.

Ah yes, hockey…it’s all about the hugging.