Soccer recap

Oh, kids soccer. The local Grandview Church of the Nazarene puts on a kids soccer league during April and May. It's Tuesday and Wednesday nights from 5:30-6:30pm and $15 per child. Low commitment, low cost, high fun--it's perfect! Somehow even that short season ends up feeling rather long to the parents by the last few weeks. It was great to watch Jay and Rose learn and play and interact with their teams, though. This year they were in separate age groups (4-5 year olds and 6-8 year olds) so they were on different teams. That made for some logistical adventures, hiking back and forth across the crowded fields to hopefully catch a glimpse of each kid playing during games. Soccer nights also wreaked havoc on our 7pm kids bedtime, but we survived!

Soccer itself aside, I was bemused by the wide variety of soccer moms and the ways they staked their claim in the world of fieldside fashion. SO many moms seemed to have put a whole lot of effort into looking effortlessly casual lounging in lawn chairs behind their large sunglasses. I had nearly as much fun people-watching during soccer as I did watching my kids kick the ball. Hah! I just have to do a breakdown of Soccer Mom Categories. It's too tempting. I hope I'm not being rude--I positively adore the variety that can be found on the sidelines of children's events.

• The for-real moms: It was plain that they had been wearing the same clothes all day (they were too practical to get dressed up just to sweat in the grass at soccer). They were wearing normal clothes that WORK for mom life and childcare. Not always the most stylish outfits or perfect hairdos, just comfy and functional. They were secure in their identities as mothers and didn't feel the need to impose their superiority on others via clothing. These were the genuine articles who would kindly ask which team my kids were on and then say positive things about the soccer program and the cute kids playing. There weren't as many of these moms as you might think! I put myself in this category.
• The working moms: Fresh off work and still wearing their office clothes or scrubs, these mamas were all business, gazing imperiously across the field, probably scanning for fellow professionals among the rabble. 
• The fashionista moms: These ladies did not try to hide their obvious effort at fashion. They followed all the latest trends, no matter how ridiculous. My most memorable image of these moms was the trio wearing rompers. Yes, ROMPERS--onesies, whatever you want to call them--a one piece garment with spaghetti straps and really short shorts. There were three of them, standing in a cluster chatting, all legs and arms in their minuscule romper suits. I wore those things when I was five. Not forty-five. I'm not trying to be mean, I was just in awe of their...lack of age-appropriate wardrobe discretion! 
• The faux-casual moms: These cool customers wore artfully messy up-dos with carefully selected wisps of hair framing their large sunglasses and subtly makeuped faces. Their clothes were carefully selected to appear casual while still flattering their best features. They walked around with a slight swagger, exuding confidence that they had successfully dressed their best, just below the blatant fashionista radar. They were full of animated exclamations with exaggerated laughter at the most trivial matters. Maddening. I observed in fascination and once actually engaged a faux-casual mom in brief superficial conversation! For fun I asked her where she got her shirt, because it was a nice shirt and I was curious. She seemed slightly taken aback and embarrassed to admit that her shirt was from Victoria Secret. Then she backed outta there as fast as she could. 

Of course there were a few other sub-categories and outliers to my four main mom-classifications, but these were the most prevalent at our soccer fields. Maybe I assigned false swagger or pride to the categories, but I did take my material from concrete repeated observation. I'm not trying to set myself above the working moms, the fashionista moms, or the faux-casual moms. To each her own! In fact, this soccer season would not have been nearly as rich, satisfying or good without the vast parental variety! It really does take all types, and I enjoy observing people in all their variations.

Ok, back to the sport at hand: SOCCER.

Jay started out slightly reserved and started having more and more fun out on the field as the season progressed. His skill level and coordination, not to mention his strategic smarts, improved visibly with each week. 

Those facial expressions!

Going in for a high five

Jay had the same awesome volunteer dad, Coach Jon, as he had last year. 

Rose started out all focused and determined, then got progressively less interested as the season progressed. At the beginning of the season, she was all over the ball, chasing, kicking, and elbowing into the fray. By the end of the season, it was all we could do to get her to stay upright on the field when it was her turn to play! Hah, she entered her own little world out there and sort of drifted after the pack of kids with the ball, dancing on the fringe like a little fairy. It's fascinating and amusing to see how each kid reacts to the same situation! 

Rose would prance around or toss her head or fly her arms out or flop to the ground to amuse herself. 

 Amber on the sidelines... Jeff and I switched off and on who went to soccer and who stayed home with Amber. The parent who stayed home usually had some sort of dinner ready for the soccer-goers to eat right upon their arrival home. Sometimes Jeff had a meeting and I took Amber to soccer with me. Other times I had activity days and Jeff took Amber to soccer solo. For the first and last games, Jeff and I both took all three kids to soccer. We did what worked.

Here's what I wrote in my journal on the last day of soccer:

[Tuesday, May 31st] SOCCER IS OVER!!! SOCCER IS OVER!!! YAY! YAY! YAY! Wow, it's amazing how long two hours per week for two months can seem when you're sitting around at soccer practice. Tonight was the last game and the after party, complete with bounce houses and hot dogs in the church of the Nazarene gym. We grabbed hot dogs for the kids and then left before anyone could request to stand in the long long lines for the bounce houses. Plus, bounce houses and hot dogs really don't sound like a good combo if you ask me. 

Jay really started thinking about where he was running and kicking this year during soccer. It was fun to watch him. He was still good at figuring out where the ball was going to be and standing there to intercept it or block it. 

Rose was fun to watch because her mind seemed always to be anywhere BUT on the soccer field. She floated around behind the cluster of kids chasing the ball, in her own little world for most of the time. Every now and then she came down to earth and kicked at the ball. 

Jay's team: The Thunder and Lighting, with Coaches Jon and Trevor--a great coaching duo!

Rose's team: The Bumblebees, with Coach Wes (who's incidentally the pastor of the Church of the Nazarene) and I never learned the other guy's name (in black).

...goodgame, goodgame, goodgame, goodgame, goodgame, goodgame...

Tuesday

Tuesday, May 31st was INTENSE. Here's an outline: 

I. 4:30am Amber wake-up 

II. Cleaning mania

III. Muffin kerfuffle

IV. Bike shopping

V. Soccer game

VI. 50 cent bedtime

I.

Over the past week, various kids have prevented me from getting anywhere near to adequate sleepy-time. That's pretty much par for the course, but there's a manageable level of sleep deprivation, and then there's the kind where I'm too brain dead to even stay awake while reading. I reached brain dead point over the past ten days and it was rough. It all came to a head on Tuesday. Amber exacerbated my tiredness with an inexplicable 4:30am wake-up. She was up for the day. Ok then!

II.

Sometimes when I'm ridiculously exhausted, I get into this crazy cleaning mania. It struck on Tuesday morning. By 10am, I had done the dishes, swept the kitchen, scrubbed the counters, vacuumed THE WHOLE HUGE HOUSE including the cursed stairs (we have about 1800 square feet of carpet), swept the garage, staked and nurtured my "somehow-still-living-in-spite-of-Amber" tomato plants, and washed two loads of laundry. BOOM! I guess my subconscious says "you may as well do All The Work because you'll be tired today whether you work or not." So I just keep going, going, going--an unstoppable tornado leaving neatness and order in its wake. Sometimes I wish my cleaning mania would come more often, hahaha.

III.

Between my Saturday and Memorial Day runs, I covered 19 miles and burned at least 2400 calories. That plus my inability to fall back to sleep lately when disturbed has left me lethargically dead tired. Oh, and HUNGRY--nay, HANGRY. That's an actual word now. I currently have this distaste for most store bought snacks, a lingering effect of my Amber-pregnancy, so if I need snacks, I have to make them. Tiring! Tiresome! I made some tasty granola bars last week, but I needed an extra boost in my belly on Tuesday, so I settled on muffins. Muffins are cute and soft and sweet and yummy! Just what I wanted. Just what my hungry tummy wanted.

When everyone was recovering from sickness last week, I opened a tub of homemade applesauce for our tender tummies. Nobody wanted it--our kids have never really been that excited about applesauce for some reason--and it has been sitting in the fridge ever since. Instead of wasting it or letting it go all green and fuzzy, I decided to use it in my muffins. Applesauce muffins! I have a delicious recipe for applesauce muffins from my childhood, where you dip the tops in melted butter and cinnamon sugar. YUM. They are heavenly, but more like cake than muffins, so I researched a healthier option online and decided to make one batch of less-healthy muffs and a batch of [slightly] more-healthy ones.

Once Amber was napping on Tuesday afternoon, I set everything out on the counter for the two different applesauce muffin recipes. Rose was poised and ready to help. This was going to be a good positive mother-daughter baking activity before Rose's afternoon movie and my afternoon alone/collapse/recovery time. Before we started mixing up the muffins, I dashed downstairs to get more baking soda from storage. In that brief minute, Rose managed to knock the applesauce off the counter. Splat! My last quart of homemade applesauce was ALL over the kitchen floor. Waaaahhh. Double waaaaah: all that hard work making my own applesauce was wasted and I had a giant sticky splattered mess to clean up. Make that a triple waaaahh: I still wanted my applesauce muffins! I was nearly in tears of exhaustion and injustice while I cleaned up the applesauce.

Poor Rose felt bad at first (or she didn't like being covered in applesauce), crying in her earsplitting, will-not-listen-to-reason fashion, but one of the difficulties I constantly have while dealing with her is her lack of sympathy for others. It's like she's five years old or something! I know, I know. I'm the adult. But she never really seems to feel bad for anything she's done. Sure, she'll cry and scream about it or about the resulting mess/discomfort (jacking my blood pressure up) and then when she's done reveling in her emotional outburst, she doesn't consider the havoc she's just wreaked upon her poor bedraggled, unslept mother. A simple "sorry, mom" would go a LONG WAY with me, but in those situations, I'm too busy breathing deeply and not voicing all of the peeved irked epithets running through my head to figure out a kind way to teach her to say sorry! When I am left broken in the kitchen kneeling in a quart of sticky applesauce, I can't help but wish for a little voluntary repentance from the perpetrator. There's a saying "if you're going to look back and laugh about it, you might as well laugh about it now." While I did not succeed in laughing during that giant 25 minute applesauce cleanup, I did at least refrain from running out of the house screaming. 

Ever hear of crumb cake? Well after my internal tantrums, I spooned as much splattered applesauce as I could off the floor into a measuring cup and miraculously there was just barely enough for my two recipes! Luckily I had swept the floor a few hours prior to the applesauce explosion so I don't think any nasty hairs, dirt, or crumbs got into the applesauce I scooped off the floor. I was chuckling (in a maniacal, mad-scientist, tired-mom way) afterwards about the double-entendre that "crumb cake" holds for me now. Floor muffins! Yahg! Aggle Flabble! 

Blessedly, the muffins tasted really really good--both recipes were awesome--as long as I place my faith in that sweeping job and ignore lurking doubts about what might have appeared on the floor during the intervening hours. Hah! Shudder. 

IV.

Tuesday afternoon, on the eve of Jeff's birthday, we loaded everyone into the van and went to the bike shop in Prosser so Jeff could pick out a real road bike as a big birthday gift/useful commuting vehicle. For the past decade he's been riding a thrift store bike that has served him well enough, but he has been ready for something a bit more...streamlined for a while now. The process of talking with the shop owner and filtering through options took rather a long time, so the kids and I wandered the streets of cute Prosser in the hot sun for the better part of an hour. We sought out shade as much as possible. There's this darling little Episcopal church with vines growing on it that always makes me smile when we drive past. We walked over to it and enjoyed the shade and the sight of the quaint building. Well, I enjoyed the trees and architecture while the kids raced up and down the wheelchair ramp out front. 

An hour standing around in the heat later, Jeff had ordered his bike and we were on our way to the last soccer game of the season.

V.

The last game of Jay's and Rose's soccer season was hot and sunny. My prescription sunglasses have been at the optometrist's office for the past week, having the lenses replaced. My face is so tired from all the squinting I've been doing in the meantime! A soccer season post with pictures is pending, but suffice it to say that the end-of-season party caused us to get home even later than usual on Tuesday night. We pulled into our driveway at 7pm, the kids' normal bedtime. Everyone still needed to eat and THEN get ready for bed. I was feeling utterly spent, but we heated up some hot dogs (a post soccer game tradition) and fed the children (brats for the grownups). Once I had some dinner in my system, the feeling of complete leaden exhaustion was intensified.

VI.

Late bedtime with overtired kids and overtired parents seemed like Mount Everest on Tuesday night. I found myself completely unequal to the task, and worse, Jeff was tired too. Gritting my teeth, I said "it's time to get ready for bed!" Predictably, Rose slumped over and moaned stubbornly. I was too tired to deal with her reluctance! I let my ideals crumble to the ground around me, arose from the rubble, and said "Rose, do you want to earn a quarter? If you get all ready for bed really fast without ANY reminders, I will give you a quarter." BOOM. She perked right up and dashed into her PJs, brushed her teeth, potty, and prayed in RECORD TIME. It was worth every one of those twenty five cents I paid her, crumbled ideals and all. Of course Rose went and told Jay about the quarter and he lickety split into his PJs for a quarter too. It was the best fifty cents I've spent all year. 

I try my best not to bribe my kids, and for the most part I'm good at sticking with that ideal. Desperate times call for desperate measures, though, and I do prefer the terms "positive reinforcement" and "incentive" over "bribe", haha. In spite of parental exhaustion, Tuesday night's fifty cent bedtime was the easiest evening in my parenting career. 

Memorial Day

When I was growing up in west Tennessee, school was always out for the summer by the second or third week of May. I didn't even realize that Memorial Day was a day-off type holiday till years later! Here in central Washington, school is in session through June 10th this year, so we reveled in our Monday off this week. Monday morning around 3:30am Rose started crying about something and Jeff and I both ended up not ever quite falling all the way back to sleep after that. Tired! But just before 6am, we piled the pajama-clad children into the car and drove to Sunnyside. While recovering from that rough sickness last weekend, Jeff missed out on the annual Sage Rat half marathon. So he pledged to run it solo on Memorial Day instead. We dropped him off on the bike path in Sunnyside and drove home as he started running. 

I ran my own solo Sage Rat half marathon on May 14th (Jeff dropped ME off in Sunnyside early that morning. The Sage Rat course starts in Sunnyside, goes straight through Grandview, and ends in Prosser. The slogan is "three cities, two counties, one state" or something like that. Jeff and I each ran solo Sage Rat halfs during May. The Lower Valley Pathway is flat as a pancake and then gently descends into Prosser on a slight down, making a fast course. 

We both ran much faster than we thought we would. Wahoo! I ran 13.1 miles in 1:51:29--slower than my best, but I started out at a conservative 8:45 pace for the first half and then ran negative splits for the entire second half of the run, whipping through mile 13 in 7:19. It felt amazing! I wish I had started out faster so my overall time would've been better! 

Jeff started out at 6:51 and then averaged 6:18 pace for the first 8 miles, then cranked it up to negative split the second half of the run as well, finishing 13.1 miles in 1:22:25. He was pretty pleased with his run, as he should be--impressive! My speedy husband. It's so refreshing these days in our "old age" to have such a long run turn out faster and easier than we expected. We're both kind of eyeing a half marathon this fall, if we can maintain-slash-improve our fitness over the summer.

{A from the car window, grainy, oddly-lit cell phone snapshot of Jeff starting his half marathon.}

Back to Memorial Day morning, Jeff met the rest of us in Prosser at the church building, where the annual double-ward Memorial Day breakfast was happening. I hung around, helped the kids get food, and talked with Jeff and friends for a little while before sneaking off to strip down to my running clothes and go on a run of my own. It's about 9.5 miles from our church building in Prosser to our house in Grandview via the bike path. I wasn't exactly in the mood to run that far since Saturday I ran 9 miles at Badger Mountain, but around these parts we runners tend to get desperate for new routes, and I had to carpe the diem. Jeff informed me that Johnson Road was a safe dog-free bike path alternative, but it added another mile to the distance. The bike path runs right between highway 82 and Wine Country Road, so it's loud and not very scenic. After a mile on the noisy bike path I realized that I was going to be tired whether I ran 9 miles or 10 miles, so I may as well take the scenic peaceful route. I'm sure there's a lesson there, haha. 

I hopped on Johnson Rd. and enjoyed four completely dog-chase-free quiet country miles before the road ended and I turned onto Mountainview. Almost the instant I left Johnson Road, I heard the tell-tale sound of paw'd toenails clinking on pavement. A glance behind me confirmed that two dogs were on the chase. Thankfully no creatures ever came uncomfortably close to my ankles, but it was a constant worry for the remainder of the run. I was tired, tired, tired after about five miles, but I managed to hold it together till the ten mile mark when I called it good and walked the last half mile home. My one regret from this run: I forgot to put sunscreen on and wore a T-back tank top. The sun lightly toasted my shoulder blades and the itching is unbearable!

{the aptly named Mountainview Road during my run--that's Mt. Adams up there on the horizon}

Jeff and I were both feeling rather worn out after our Memorial Day long runs, so we laid low till after Amber's nap. I think we played some family Nintendoland on the Wii, but it's all kind of hazy--I was really tired. This picture is from Sunday when we played the Wii together. I think we played Monday too? Mario Chase and Luigi's Ghost House are the perennial favorites. They are variations on the game Tag, and the kids love playing. We are guaranteed squeals and laughter every time. Amber adores clutching her Wii remote without batteries and watching the action with rapt attention.

Later, we gathered our remaining energy and headed out back to the soccer field to play a family game of whiffle ball at Jay's request. We watched The Sandlot for family movie night a couple of weeks ago and Jay has been intrigued by baseball ever since. We promised him a game of Whiffle ball this weekend. We set up a makeshift T for the kids to hit the ball off of using a cup on a stool. We set the ball in the cup and the cup on the stool, and it was about the right height for Jay's and Rose's swing. We put sticks down for bases and started to play.

It was hot and sunny. The field had not been mowed recently, so the sticks/bases were hidden the thick grass. Jay and Rose had never played any kind of diamond-game before, so we had to teach them along the way. Jay kept getting fustrated with not knowing all of the rules, and I was amused at my efforts to try teaching them--I'm no sports expert! Thank goodness Jeff has a better handle on rules and technique than I do, ha ha. Jay also kept saying he was bored (HA, welcome to baseball, son!). Rose cried every time she got tagged out. Amber kept wandering off, requiring Jeff or myself to chase her down and bring her back into range. And I could not pitch straight enough for Jeff to get a hit! HAH! I'm not as good a player as he is, but he can pitch better so I actually hit the ball while my wild pitches did not work for him. Another element of hilarity entered when Jay and Rose abandoned the bases and the game degenerated into: chase the hitter around the entire soccer field and tag the person with the ball. I sat down and started taking pictures at that point, cracking up. After about 30 or 40 minutes we were all hot and tired and ready to be done with America's Pastime. 

 Jay triumphant, Rose dejected after being tagged out.

 Red cheeked Amby in the sun!

We came in and rested before whipping up a salad and taking it down the street to Grampa Dan's house for a family hot dog BBQ with the sister missionaries. Then, bed for the kids and true collapse/Netflix for the parents.

Happy Memorial Day!

This holiday is in memory of those who have given their lives so that I can live mine safe and sound with my sweet family in this great country. 

Thanks to them, we had a carefree Monday off.