It's The Little Things

It being a holiday weekend, there will be soccer tournaments.  I believe it is a law of nature up there with gravitation and classical mechanics.  The boys are playing in tournaments in two different states (the girl is blessedly off this weekend) so it is going to be a 'divide and conquer' couple of days for Himself and me.  We had a rough idea of how we were going to handle the logistics until all the emails from Thing Two's team manager started coming in yesterday afternoon.

Seems that the fields where his tourney is being played have limited parking and each team has been issued only six parking passes for 12-14 players plus a coach.  (Since I was in the car with Petunia helping her with her homework during Thing Two's practice on Wednesday, I missed this.)  There is a park and ride shuttle to the fields from a central collecting area, but with an unknown schedule for that and a very set schedule for soccer games, that's a big wild card.  By far and away the wisest thing to do is to tag up with somebody who got one of the parking passes, but I have to admit that my first thought about that was something along the lines of "Aw, crap."

I've mentioned before that all three of my kids are new to their teams this year.  That left us with something on the order of 45 new kids to identify plus all their families to keep straight between the three teams, kind of a tall order especially at the beginning of the season.  I figured everyone who was lucky enough to get a parking pass would have already filled their car with people they've known for years, leaving me and Thing Two to figure out the shuttle schedule.  Since we live a good half an hour from the town this new club is based in, when we decided to switch the kids over we did it knowing that we'd likely be the odd ones out socially just for geographic reasons.  

Then I got home and found the message on my phone from another family asking if we wanted to ride with them.  Made me feel really good as the new kid on the block, I won't lie.  Then, we decided to switch and have me drive instead of them because I have a bigger-capacity soccer mom mobile, and I was able to offer another mom and boy a ride too.  Building a community one carpool at a time.