Soccer!

Sometimes I forget how much I thought I would hate this part of life: the soccer mom part. Inga, Andrei, and Elena are all in soccer and they each have practice 1-2x per week and games on Saturdays. Each team requires each family to volunteer for snack shack or information booth, and each team requires each family to bring a snack to at least one game for the team. Oh, and you have to watch your kid play soccer out in the sun where there is no mercy from the heat and you have to somehow seem knowledgeable about what your kid is doing out there on the field while your other kids are driving you nuts with their antics. Of course I would hate this. But...amazingly...I don't. I love to see my kids working hard toward a goal with their team, I love to see them push themselves to keep going even when they are exhausted and I especially like it when they look like they actually know how to play this game. Because I never did. I remember going to Anne Marie's soccer practices (most memorable moment: I bit into a Star Crunch chocolate-y thing and got a mouthful of little worms and eggs and never ate another one again), and although I love Anne Marie (please let me make that clear), I hated watching her practices. Hated it. I recall thinking I must be receiving some sort of sisterhood points for caring and that is what helped me through it...but I swore I would never put myself through it again, so my children would just have to learn to live without sports. And then I married Dan. And found out that when it is your own kid out there, everything changes.


Oh. And it is really easy to get sunburned. (Like the shirt? It doesn't fit Dan, so he gets to enjoy it on me :)