"So much drama," the hockey dad said to me, scuttling his son back onto the ice.

"Yeah," I said. "I know."

I wanted to shoot red lasers at him from my eyeballs.

I should go back to the beginning. Back when I was getting Charlie’s pads and skates on and looking angrily at a 415 on his meter. 415 was not at all part of the plan.

From the cold bleachers we watch Charlie through the glass. We watch him grimace and straighten his back. We watch him as he falls to the ice and stays down too long, pressing on the outside of his ankles.

Why is he on his knees so much, we ask? The other kids aren’t doing that. Why is he so uncomfortable?

Is it because he’s 400?

Can we blame diabetes? (READ MORE)

I’m the assistant coach for Charlie’s street hockey team. The "blue team." For the first few weeks of the season, we looked like the Bad News Bears. We were scoring in our own goal, holding hockey sticks the wrong way and one kid may have yelled "touchdown!" when we scored our first goal. We were losing games by large margins and watching our opponents celebrate often.

Winning is nice of course but it is so much sweeter after you’ve tasted a fair share of defeat. Maybe the same can be said for managing diabetes. We measure our success by how far we’ve come.

On this day, the blue team had enough of losing. They played with a ton of heart, ending their losing streak with a giant 7-2 victory.

  (READ MORE)