It’s that time of year again.  March Madness.  Three weeks of college basketball.

And many, many nights of my husband cheering on his alma mater.  Possibly accompanied by girlish squeals.

It’s a glorious time of year.  As I have endured watched the NCAA Men’s Basketball tourney every March for the last decade I’ve been with my husband, I’ve found myself getting roped in to the buzz and excitement.

Sure, I don’t know diddlysquat about basketball.  But with so many teams, so many Cinderella stories, so many underdogs, there’s bound to be a team to get attached to.  Maybe you like your old college team.  Perhaps you have a mascot fetish.

And if you have money on the tournament, well, all the more reason to bite your fingernails this week.

They say that the weeks of March Madness are the most unproductive work weeks of the year.  And I have to admit, I have fallen prey to this distraction.

My husband and I participate in a pool every year.  The entry fee?  A paltry $25.   Multiply that by the hundreds of gamblers participants that pony up every year, and you could win big.

When we first started doing this pool, it was old school.  There were no online brackets.  Everything was done by hand.  And you sneaked in peeks to the break room television every 30 minutes to see if you were ahead of the pack or sinking like a ship.

Then a few years ago, the whole operation joined the internet, and I became a junkie.  Armed with my printed bracket, I’d ferociously check my stats every hour to see if I had pulled ahead of my husband’s college friend’s wife, or if I was so down in the roster that I should consider getting back to that scarf I started working on years ago for the rest of March.

When you’re so submerged in to a culture that you can’t see straight, you start to see the entire world through that lens.  My husband and I would start to narrow our dinner choices based on a very intricate bracket system.  Restaurants were eliminated quickly in the first round.  Only the mighty would survive, save for the #13 seed dark-horse of the bunch.

Now that I’m a parent and live each day on a fast-moving roulette wheel of behavior and emotion, I’m viewing my preschooler’s tantrum potential in the same vein as the NCAA.

That’s right.  Parenting is Madness at its finest.  And so, I present to you…

The 2013 Tantrum Tournament

I’ve done you the favor of letting you see my personal bracket, hours before tip-off.  Should you need your own printable bracket to complete yourself, feel free to contact me.