Soccer season is coming to a close. I got to watch my daughter play one of her last games of the season this past Saturday.
She’s got a powerful boot:
which she likes to deploy on goal kicks:
Here she is realizing that she just scored a goal from her goalie box with her signature move:
That’s my girl.
With so much snow and rain this year, the kids’ soccer soccer season kept getting delayed. The sun finally came out on Saturday and it was glorious. In between ferrying all three kids to their various fields, we got to appreciate glimpses of the miracles wrought by all that water:
As usual, there were tragedies and triumphs…This is the face of tragedy:
The tragedy was not the fact that his team lost, but the fact that between 7:40 and 8 am when this child had to leave for his game, a desperate, angst-filled search for the orange socks needed to complete his splendid ensemble was all for naught:
Speaking of red…I have officially begun working on my Soccer Mom Tan:
Ouch.
Fall weekends for my family are all about soccer, soccer, and more soccer…
This one made me laugh…
Our girl played her game this weekend as she always does – fearlessly. My son chuckled, “She’s all, ‘Come at me, bruh.'”
Dirty knees. Clean sheet.
#1: Playing soccer in flip flops is not a good idea.
#2: It’s good to cheer for your team, even if from the sidelines.
#3: “When you take your shin guards off after playing soccer, your legs are covered in leg cheese!”
No photo, because…ew.
We interrupt your regularly scheduled program (i.e. The Grand Tour du Nord) to bring you this World Cup update.
The World Cup has profoundly changed my life in so many ways…
When my oldest child was just a toddler, I signed him up for recreational soccer. He loved every second of it. As the ball dribbled past his legs, he would crouch low with keen focus to inspect the ants crawling around on the blades of grass. As the ball sailed past him, he would gaze up at the sky and find dragons in the clouds above him.
We gave up on soccer for a few years. In 2010 we went to England to visit my husband’s family in Manchester. Our stay happened to coincide with the World Cup. Our kids watched the games on their grandparents’ tiny television, mesmerized. Since that fateful summer, all three of them have been obsessed with soccer.
That fall my father-in-law made all of their dreams come true, by sending them these Manchester United jerseys:
They like DC United too:
My daughter wrote about her impressions of her first pro game for a school assignment:
This past year our son’s team got to greet the DC United players as they came onto the pitch for their first game of the season:
My husband and I, both unathletic couch jockeys, have even managed to be conscripted as assistant coaches at one time or another:
Every fall and spring, my weekends are spent driving from field to field, not only within our own hometown, but as far afield as Maryland and West Virginia.
Even our recent vacation schedule revolved around soccer and was dictated by what time we would need to get back to the hotel to watch the World Cup games:
For all of my grousing, soccer has taught my children some valuable lessons and skills. They have learned the importance of teamwork, dedication, and of course: sportsmanship.
Yesterday, I came home to this reenactment of the Italy vs. Uruguay game:
It really is a “beautiful game.”
Tomorrow: Back to our regularly scheduled programming and: Buffalo. Yes, Buffalo.
Part 1: The Game.
On Sunday we drove a little over two hours to get my eleven year old to his soccer game. The team won, which was nice. We also discovered a really fabulous restaurant – Roma Casual Italian and Greek Dining. (It was so good that we’re trying to think of excuses to drive to Winchester again…If you’re anywhere near the vicinity of Stephens City right off I-81 you should go)! On the way back home, we stopped at a couple scenic overlooks to admire the view, stretch our legs, and to take photos, of course:
Part 2: I have some confessions to make.
Four plus hours of driving for a seventy minute game seems grossly excessive to me.
I get anxious when it starts to rain on a practice day or a game day…
And if I get an email letting me know that soccer has been canceled because of the rain, I feel like this:
Sometimes Often, I wish I were at home doing loads of laundry rather than sitting in the freezing cold/boiling hot weather watching my kids’ soccer games…And you can’t even imagine how much I hate doing laundry.
Sometimes I sit on the sidelines watching a game thinking that the other parents on the sidelines who are getting overly excited about a little kids’ soccer game are acting like jackasses.
Sometimes to my utter horror and amazement, I’m the jackass getting overly excited about the outcome of a little kids’ soccer game.
Here’s what I think whenever I see my son do a header:
There go his SAT scores!
Here’s how I felt yesterday when the team manager sent around an email to break the news that the tournament in Williamsburg our team had signed up for over Memorial Day weekend had been canceled…
and would we want to go to one in Richmond instead?
And here’s how I felt when the coach sent around another email today to let us know that not enough people had expressed a burning desire to spend their Memorial Day weekend watching soccer game after soccer game after soccer game:
Shhhhhh! Please don’t tell my kids.
Let the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby
From “April Rain Song,” by Langston Hughes
It’s been cold and grey and wet for three days straight, but I still maintain that it was a beautiful weekend. Because of the rain, my daughter’s soccer practice on Friday was canceled, her game on Saturday was canceled, and my son’s soccer tournament that had been scheduled for Saturday AND Sunday in Richmond was CANCELED! Each text or email announcing the cancellation of these events sent me into a paroxysm of unseemly jubilation. Theoretically speaking, (if I happened to be the kind of person to engage in embarrassing self-revelation), it’s possible that there may have been some fist-pumping, jiggety-jigging in place, and squeals of delight.
What fabulous things did I do with all of that time that was handed to me like a precious gift on a silver platter? We went to the grocery store to buy the pumpkin my oldest son needed for a school project. We went to the shoe store to buy much-needed new sneakers for the younger two. We went to the music store to get my daughter’s violin bow repaired. We went to the pet store to buy the only food that doesn’t make the dogs puke foamy yellow bile all over the carpets. (Always the carpets, never – God forbid – on the far easier to clean tile or hardwood). We took my daughter to get her hair cut. We went to Jiffy Lube. (Every 3,000 miles? More like every 10,000+ miles…). I got caught up on laundry, etc. etc. And yes, a million times YES! It was really and truly: fabulous.
I didn’t take many photos this weekend, but I did record a couple snapshots in my mind to share with you. They are somewhat related insofar as they both involve food and the sweet, innocent thoughtfulness of children.
On Friday, the Helping Hands group I co-lead met for our first session of the year. This fall, our third and fourth grade kids are organizing a school-wide food drive for the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank. A friend who works at the bank came to talk to us about the problem of hunger in our own community. We discussed how hunger makes people crabby and makes it difficult to concentrate and to work or study. The most powerful moment of the talk came when she told us that the bank serves 26,000 people a month. To give us an idea of how many people that is, she had us visualize a line of people starting from downtown Charlottesville stretching all the way up Route 29 for 8 miles to the airport. This startling image made a big impression on us all. My friend was about to leave after her presentation when one of our students ran up to her and handed her a fistful of coins, all the money she had in her pocket, as a gift to the food bank. It was a lovely moment.
And then there was this moment that revealed to me that my daughter had also absorbed the message about the problem of hunger. On Sunday my husband was feeling a little grumpy and I asked my daughter what we should do to cheer him up. She suggested earnestly: “Maybe we could put a hunk of Jarlsburg (his favorite kind of cheese) under his pillow!”
Finally, I leave you with one actual snapshot from this weekend. This was taken during a brief break on Saturday, when instead of playing/watching soccer, we were checking items off our my list of errands at breakneck speed. First, observe the expressions on the faces of my husband and children. Now look very closely at my reflection in the window. Can you see the maniacal grin pasted on my face?
See? Best weekend ever!
Just a few photos from the weekend…
Saturday
The referee didn’t show up for my daughter’s soccer game…
…so her brother got to do the job!
After the game, my girl celebrated her team’s win and tried to help the ref cool off at the same time:
We drove on to Carter Mountain Orchard to pick some apples and to admire some of the very best views of Charlottesville.
We caught this beautiful sunset after dinner:
Sunday
We woke up at the crack of dawn and then drove for more than two hours, literally through Wilderness, to get to my son’s soccer game. I was bursting with pride, because I managed to get lost for only fifteen minutes! Sure, I got the boys there fifteen minutes after they were supposed to arrive, but they weren’t the last to arrive. I call that: a WIN!
The boys played their hardest in brutal 90 degree weather, but fell to their opponents in the end.
You win some, you lose some!
FRIDAY
The SPCA. Helping Hands, the elementary school service group I co-lead, took a field trip to our local SPCA. Miraculously, we left with no more and no fewer than the bodies we came with, though one of our second graders piped up at the end to announce that he had money in his pocket and was ready to make a deal…
SATURDAY
Soccer Games. My girl kept a clean sheet as goalie in the first half, and then scored the only goal for the win in the second!
Fundraising. My son’s Destination Imagination team is going to Globals along with another winning team from his elementary school. Between my daughter’s and his own soccer games, we worked at a huge yard sale both teams held in the school gym to help offset the considerable cost of the trip. My daughter was wandering around the yard sale when she spotted something on one of the tables.
“Is that my jack-in-the-box?” she gasped in horror.
I squirmed as I said, “Ummm, well, yes, but that’s a toy for babies.”
I told her we would take it back if it didn’t sell, and fortunately, it is now back in our house, where it belongs. For the rest of the weekend she kept pointedly reminding me about how my sister had asked me for a pair of her baby sandals that had the perfect imprints of her tiny little feet and was furious when she found out I had thrown them away.
“My beloved Janel” surprised us by sending a check to help with the fundraising. We haven’t been able to see each other in way too long. We had a phone conversation to hatch a plan to fix this!
Gardening. I made the rounds of some local garden centers and got my fingernails dirty in my own garden…
SUNDAY
Theological Debate. My oldest son and I had a hasty and somewhat tortured discussion in which we weighed the merits of atheism vs. agnosticism and discussed the importance of being reflective, keeping an open mind, and always asking questions. All this in the church parking lot, minutes before Sunday School was about to start, as I fervently prayed that he would stop asking questions for Christ’s sake! I broke into a sweat as I surreptitiously snuck glances at the clock, and mentally calculated how much time it would take to cut up the paper strips we would need for the purple “cloth weaving” we were going to do as part of the lesson I’d prepared on Lydia opening her heart to Jesus.
Wrestling. Back at home, having just partaken in Holy Communion, where they symbolically sought “reconciliation in every instance of conflict or division,” the boys decided to have a wrestling match. As always, it ended up in tears and bitter recriminations. For the next half hour, I made them practice for their piano recital, but Beethoven’s Rage Over a Lost Penny, kept derailing into Rage Over a Lost Wrestling Match. Finally, I was forced to bellow, “STOP TALKING TO EACH OTHER! YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO SPEAK TO EACH OTHER AT ALL! NOT. ONE. MORE. WORD!!”
Piano Recital. My husband headed off to Lynchburg for his own concert with his singing group. The rest of us dusted ourselves off and staggered to the boys’ last piano recital of the year…Rather than run the risk of more bickering, I made the oldest sit up front with me during the ride, instead of in his usual spot in the back of the minivan with his siblings. En route, he and I devised a post-recital game plan.
Obligatory Photo Op. As you can see, the boys worked it out, as they always eventually do.
The kids took turns taking pictures of their own.
Then they took a series of “artsy shots” and insisted I post them on the blog today. There you go, kids:
Dick’s Sporting Goods. After the photo session I announced that it was time to go to Dick’s Sporting Goods.
“Why are we going there?” my younger son asked.
His brother and I answered him simultaneously:
N: “To buy a punching bag.”
Me: “To save your relationship with your brother.”
When I went to check on the boys tonight, I realized that N. had set up a makeshift bed for himself on the floor of T’s bedroom. Peace in the valley. I’m heading to bed.
When I was my daughter’s age, I was woefully uncoordinated. Not only was I devoid of any shred of athletic ability, I grew up in a family that didn’t play or watch sports. P.E. class felt like torture. It was just assumed that kids had a baseline knowledge of sports such as baseball or basketball. But I didn’t even know that you aren’t supposed to run with the ball in basketball. In the highly unlikely event that a baseball bat I was wielding would ever make contact with the ball, I wouldn’t have had any idea in which direction I should run. I was clearly such a hopeless case that eventually my P.E. teacher would let me go to the playground, rather than participate in his class.
For some reason, one day I got it into my head that I might try soccer. When I asked my mom and dad if I could join the kid soccer league, they told me, “Girls don’t play soccer.” Remember: this was decades ago, and my parents are from Korea, where girls, in fact, still don’t play soccer. I let it drop without a fuss.
Fast forward to today…My 7 year old daughter is well into her fifth season of soccer. In her very first season, we realized she was pretty good. Here she is celebrating her 7th out of 10 goals with her best buddy. (I think the score was something like 12 to 2).
Recently, we were discussing what she wanted to be for Halloween. “I’m going to be Abby Wambach!” she said in a sudden burst of inspiration.
“Abby Wombat?” I asked. I thought this must be some animated t.v. character I wasn’t up on.
She looked at me in disbelief. There was an unmistakable note of pity and maybe even a little bit of disgust in her voice, “Abby Wambach?! U.S. Women’s soccer team?!”
Yeesh. Whatever, kid.
Yesterday evening I went to pick her and her brother up at the soccer field, where her 10 year old brother was having his practice. Her brother plays for a boys’ U-12 (under 12 years old) “challenge” team that you have to try out for. Usually I find her off to the side kicking around a soccer ball or watching the action on the field.
This is what I saw yesterday. The light was dim, and I only had my camera phone, but I snapped away…See the little blur in the black and white soccer shirt and turquoise skirt? Yep, that’s my girl, holding her own with the big boys:
And here’s the funniest part. I still don’t really know how to play soccer, but look:
Oh, and my mom and dad are very proud of their soccer-playing granddaughter!
o wonderful, wonderful 