I signed my two younger kids up for a learn to skate program. It is also a hockey program so we dress them up in the full equipment, including those adorable shoulder thingies and hit the ice.

It says 'Learn to Skate' in the program guide and yet most kids get on the ice and skate quickly and aggressively around the rink.

My kids immediately fall down - again and again.

Kids love playing sports and parents love having their kids in sports - especially if they show some glimmer of talent. But being active in competitive sports comes with an element of risk.

And that risk keeps increasing. There is a national discussion going on about head injuries in youth sport and now we can add knee injuries to the list as well.

My kids don't play hockey in fact, they can hardly skate, so the whole concussion discussion goes on around me without me having a stake in it. But I do hear the fear in moms' voices when they talk of their kids (especially their boys) getting older. The risks they take and are encouraged to take on the ice is scary.

And they wonder if it is worth it.

My eight-year-old son runs off the field and asks me the score. "Um, I have no idea," is my answer.

"It's five - two for us," yells a teammate.

No, it's eight - 1," yells another.

The final score isn't such a big deal at our soccer house league, there is no scoreboard, so I'm never sure what the final numbers are. I guess someone knows. It doesn't really matter because the finals are a round robin anyways. I like that the score is de-emphasized, it's nice to win but it's pretty horrible when either team gets totally demolished.

My son was like a dog with a ball - all he wanted to do was play tennis. Mom, please let's play tennis in the yard; can I take tennis lessons? please? tennis! tennis! tennis!

Finally, I found a small club where he could take lessons after school and off we went. And (you know what is coming next, right?) he hated it and wanted to quit. It was a question of expectations. His expectation was that he was going to be an awesome tennis player; the coach's expectation was that he was going to do drills and learn how to hit the ball.

I hate a lot of things to do with skiing - being cold, being active, wearing dorky clothes, the possiblility of pain. Did I mention being active? Because I generally hate all physical activity.

But my husband is an avid snowboarder and I begrudgingly understand that a winter sport is a good thing to do. Our kids don't play hockey (egads!), so we had to take something up or lose our Canadian citizenship. So I ski. I skied for a few years, took a decade off to have kids and am now back at it - and I suck.

Confession time: my kids don't play hockey, they don't do gymnastics, they don't race, go to tournaments, compete in Triple A, Sele Act, or any elite, high-level way. They do not devote more than one day a week to any one extracurricular. And that makes us a bit weird.

I like it that way. Maybe it's just a rationalization for my non-athletic kids but it is also choice. My kids play ball hockey, they do Karate and music classes, they ski, play soccer and do art; they have playdates and downtime (and a few video games). We walk the dog and have family dinners.

We don't shlep around the city, we don't drag the other kids around when their sibling is playing a game, our family doesn't circle around one sport or one child.

My 10-year old son is a terrible swimmer. It’s not from a lack of swimming lessons or exposure, he just can’t get it all his body parts moving in the right direction to propel him properly in the water.

That, and he hates putting his face under. But swimming is a part of life and he encounters many situations where he is at a pool or a lake so he fakes it. He hangs out on the side, he grabs a floatie, he directs the action instead of being part of it. No one realizes that he isn’t a good swimmer.

And because he still horses around in the water, I have a lot of fear that he is at risk of drowning.

An email when through the mommy network this week that only heightened my anxieties. It described how drowning doesn’t really look like how we think of drowning. What drowning really looks like is something that everyone who is near the water should know.

Could you manage if you lost your partner? I’m not sure I could. Not to be morbid, but it’s one of the things that my hubby and I discuss, he is wracked with anxiety that I wouldn’t be able to support our family if something happened to him. That’s why our wills and insurance are always up-to-date.

But pieces of paper can not protect you from the realities that bad things happen and they can happen in an instant. Last summer, a father of my son’s classmate had an aneurysm and died in two days. It was sudden and terrible and the kids were away at camp so they never got to see their dad again.

It was a tragedy that rocked our community but once we delivered our casseroles, we were able to move on to our daily life. The now-single mom is left with trying to pick up the pieces. And there are a lot of pieces, she met her husband while travelling through Canada and has never worked in this country. Within days she went from having a comfortable life as a hockey mom and playground staple to being forced to find a way to support herself and her two boys.The widow is fiercely private but being the centre of a tragedy has made her life open to neighbours and friends discussing all aspects of her personal life – both financial and emotional.

At approximately 5:36 p.m. the email messages started pouring in: “I believe” and “Oh My god!” and “We did it”. They were, of course, referring to the Canada-U.S. hockey game and the winning of Canada’s 14th  and some say, most important gold.  The funny thing is that all those emails were from my Canadian friends who live in the States. They were watching with their kids and their Maple Leafs on their shirts and in some cases drinking a 2-4 of Canadian beer.

Some of them have lived in the States for 15 years, their kids were born there, they eat, sleep and dream the U.S.  and they are mostly like there for the rest of their lives.  But they feel Canadian, and they instill a sense of Canada in their kids too. One of my best friends lives in New Jersey Devils territory and even knows some of the players, but her son very politely told his pals that he would be rooting for Canada.