Home at last...

Empty van. Three nights and 4 days in a hotel and convention center. Met people from all over the country, commiserating with other parents waiting for an hour at a time for their kids to win or lose their match, trying to figure out when and where to get food ($3 for a 20oz bottle, $4.10 for a 32oz cup IF the snack bar was open). Everyone hot, sweaty & increasingly tired. But the players were in their element big time and could not care less about anything else. Kids from 6 to 15 then another 300+ even older. Once the overwhelmingness of the event wore off, though, I began to be concerned about all those people that are so devoted to this stuff - it takes a LOT of time & effort & money to get good enuf to play at this event - there isn't a lot of room for anything else in their lives. Parents wanting to support their younger children I get, but parents themselves playing with this level of intensity???
It gave me reason to pause and reconsider taking my own kids - there are IMPORTANT things they could be doing and NEED to be doing with their lives, productive things. And what about MY life? What am I doing with it to demonstrate this to my kids??
*ouch*. My brain hurts....