Rough Around The Edges But A Heart Of Marshmallow

Thing One and Petunia share a soccer coach.  To say that he is blunt would be an understatement of epic proportions: he's one of those inherently loud Northeasterners (originally from the NYC area, I would guess, based on his choices in sports teams) who speaks his mind in no uncertain terms and often in profanity-laden ones, depending on his audience.  Having seen the man coach teenaged boys first, I was more than a little dubious about how that would translate to my ten year-old daughter, but fortunately he is able to filter himself around the girls.  As a coach, he is a yeller, albeit one every bit as quick to yell praise as criticism.  Petunia was terrified of him until she got used to his decibel level, but her first choice for next year is his team, if that tells you anything about the turnaround in her opinion of him.

Anyway, this evening there was a tryout for his team.  I was running back and forth between three fields between the three kids, so I didn't get to watch as much of the tryout as I would have liked, but Petunia seemed to be doing an awful lot of sitting on the sideline and was looking rather forlorn as a result.  After a while, he called her over to him and they had one of those conversations between a coach and a player that you sometimes see on the sidelines of a televised football game, where the coach is holding a clipboard in front of his face so you can't read his lips.  After a minute or two, she nodded and then he told her to grab a pinney and sent her into the game.  I asked her about that in the car on the way home.  She said that he called her over to reassure her that she wasn't playing much because they already knew that she was going to make the team and there were other players he needed to look at more.  Clearly he understands how hard she is on herself, and he both noticed her mood and took the time to make her feel better in the middle of a busy tryout.

Strangely enough, he had a very similar interaction with Thing One last weekend, adjusted for age and gender.  Thing One is one of those kids who takes his job on the field very seriously.  Whenever he's pulled out of a game, if there's any question at all about it, the first thing he does is ask the coach if he did something wrong.  It's actually become kind of a running joke with the coaches although they do legitimately appreciate that he's asking because he wants to get it right the next time.  The boys had two games last weekend, a regular league game on Saturday and a huge State Cup game on Sunday.  Before the Saturday game, the coaches told the boys that they were trying to figure out a way to win the game while resting the starters as much as possible for Sunday, so they should be expecting some odd assignments on the field.  Thing One was one of the boys told to expect to sit more than usual.  He played most of the first half and came out just before halftime.  He didn't go back in after halftime, and seemed ok until every other boy sitting out at the time was sent back in other than him, at which point he actually started pacing up and down the sideline.

As he recounted the conversation afterward, around then this coach asked what in the world he was doing, and he asked if he was going to get back into the game.  The coach looked at him and said, "I already told you that you were going to sit more than usual today.  When there's a big game, you play every damned minute of it because we need you in there, and you know it as well as I do.  Now sit your &%$&% ass down on that bench and &%#$& REST!"

Clearly, his internal marshmallow takes different forms with ten year-old girls and fourteen year-old boys, but no doubt it's there in both cases.  The man cares deeply about the kids he coaches and both of my kids are fortunate to have him training them.  My daughter is also fortunate that he has that filter!

Yeah, I Guess A Few Things Have Changed

2018: My son's high school has a strict no-tolerance, no exception drug and alcohol policy.  This includes nicotine (vaped or otherwise.)

Late 1980s: My high school had a smoking lounge, and most of the kids drank alcohol well before the legal age in the US, but then again, we were outside the US.  It wasn't something we officially talked about at school, though.

Mid 1970s: See picture below, taken today of the "Class Favorites" page of a high school yearbook.  Sorry, I know it's a bit hard to read.  Aside from the clearly dated choices in musicians and actors, holy cow: do you see that their favorite brands of cigarettes (Marlboro) and beer (Heineken) are listed?  And that their favorite mixed drink was 7&7??

It also cracks me up that their favorite athlete was OJ Simpson.  Talk about a time capsule!

I Don’t See This Ending Well

A girlfriend of mine recently told me that her son was being bullied at school.  Today, she announced on Facebook that she will be homeschooling him, which is an understandable reaction, except that she both misspelled “homeschooling” and capitalized “Son” in the middle of the sentence.  I don’t mean to be unkind, I really don’t, but given that the kid is in elementary school, I hope she is either going to use a textbook or some sort of online resource to teach him Language Arts.  And much more importantly, how awful is it that a kid in this age of bullying laws could still be harassed so badly at school that his mother feels it necessary to pull him completely out of school??

Update

We found out last night that the pink socks of ferociousness came through yet again for Petunia.  She made the soccer team that the player development coach of our current club recommended that she look at. (See this post)  Since we don’t know much about the team other than that it comes recommended by a man whom we trust and respect, we’ve requested permission to bring her to a practice of theirs before we make a decision.  We shall see.  She had two games yesterday, one with each of the two teams for which she currently plays, and had excellent games in both, so it seems that things are starting to come together for her.  The difficulty will be choosing what is best for her, bearing in mind that the major objectives are that she have fun and play on a competitive team that will allow her to grow her skills, in that order.

Way More Than Just A Little Help

Himself is out of town again. Murphy’s Law being what it is, my kids have four soccer games between them today, in three different places. And in cold rain, too. Ugh.

I needed help getting Thing One from point A to point B for his game and put out an email message to his team last night to see if anyone could give him a ride. I got SIX responses, including several from people who would have to drive significantly out of their way to do it but offered anyway because they are kind souls.  I love this team. He’s staying on it as long as they’ll have him.

Whomever said that it takes a village to raise a child clearly had kids who are travel athletes. Boy, am I grateful for my village!!

Pink And Proud

My daughter has a screaming pink pair of soccer socks that she wears when she wants to inspire herself to play especially well.  She calls them the “pink socks of ferociousness.”  I love that kid.

She’s had some soccer drama surrounding her lately, mostly centered on trying to figure out where she should play next year.  (It’s tryout season again, meaning that teams are being chosen for fall 2018/spring 2019.)  To make a very long story short in an attempt not to bore you all to tears, she’s currently playing on two teams, one her own age and one a year up, but neither for various reasons is the best fit for her.  We’ve been looking at other area teams in her age group, even though that would involve her moving to a different club.  Right now all three of my kids play for the same club and we like it a lot as an organization, so that’s not ideal.

We had her try out at a couple of the clubs and subsequently found ourselves in a position where we really needed some guidance.  I called the director of player development at the current club, whom I know well, and explained the situation.  While he *really* doesn’t want her to go, he understands our thought process.  Over the course of a twenty-minute conversation, he outlined what he thought should happen with her if she stays and told us that in his opinion one of the other clubs we were looking at was a good call and that the second should be removed from consideration immediately.  Then, to his unending credit, he told us that we should also look at a team we hadn’t even considered, at which a man he knows personally coaches her age group at a high level.  He subsequently called the guy and said we were coming to the next tryout and to keep an eye out for her.

Last night, Petunia donned the pink socks of ferociousness and we went to check out this newly recommended club.  We haven’t heard anything official yet and won’t till Sunday, but our back channel suggests that she will likely receive an offer for their top team.  There isn’t a rush to settle this and we have some time, but I’m so proud of my girl that I could pop.  Not because she (supposedly) made the team, but because she’s a fierce and brave little soul who will charge headlong into a tryout full of total strangers on two days’ notice, armed only with pink socks!

Oh, and I can’t say enough good things about our player development guy either.  His willingness to go the extra mile (or hundred) to get her on the right team for her even though it might mean she ends up playing for another club speaks volumes about his integrity and how much he cares about the kids.

That Venus And Mars Thing

Sometimes I am strongly reminded that male and female brains work very differently. Yesterday was one of those days.

As a male friend and I were pulling into a parking spot at a convenience store, a woman came out of the store and got into the car in the adjacent spot.  She was too close for both of us not to register her presence. She was a larger woman with a very unusual hairstyle and a ring in her nose, all of which I noted casually to myself as she walked by.  The only thing my friend noticed was that she was wearing a Penguins sweatshirt!  He is a big hockey fan and hates Pittsburgh because Crosby is a punk.

XX versus XY for you in a nutshell, ladies and gents.

Success

I believe I mentioned here recently that one of my (more tongue-in-cheek) goals in life is not to fit any of the conventional stereotypes.  To that end, I have recently taken up knitting since it SO would not ordinarily go along with my black belt in taekwondo and semi-extreme geocaching habit.  Gives me something to do with my hands other than mindlessly surf the Net, too, and I like crafty stuff.  Win-win.

The needle variety of knitting seems more complicated than I am ready to handle without personal assistance, but I bought a set of those round plastic loom things on a whim a couple of weeks ago.  With the help of the accompanying booklet and a few YouTube videos, I am happy to say that I have so far successfully managed to produce one scarf, four hats and three double-takes from friends.  :)

finished scarf

close-up of end of scarf

beginning of hat on loom

middle of hat on loom, brim complete at bottom

four completed hats, two brim styles. top left hat has two different-colored strands of wool woven in, top right hat switched between two colors  

Another Planet Heard From

Or at least part of this one that is far, far away.

Walked into my laundry room to run a load of wash today and discovered this on the floor between the washer and dryer.

In case you can't see it clearly, it's an Aruban 10-cent piece.   We've never been to Aruba.  Somewhere, an alien is is either laughing at my confusion or annoyed that it dropped a coin into a wormhole.

And if there IS a wormhole in my laundry room, that would explain a lot about all the missing socks. Maybe the aliens have them.  :)

Happy Easter!

There have always been two schools of thought in the Christian churchgoing community regarding those folks who only attend services on Christmas and Easter (lovingly referred to by some as "C and E-ers.")  The one school says that twice a year is better than never.  The other holds that people who don't attend services any other week of the year shouldn't be taking up valuable seat space in the packed churches of major-religious-occasion-time, which could otherwise be occupied by more regular churchgoers.  

I have to admit that I do see both sides of the argument.  I'd also like to add for the record that some of the most "Christian" (as in behavior, not in name) people I know are galloping atheists who also happen to believe in the Golden Rule and act accordingly, so as far as I'm concerned, church attendance is not necessarily connected in any way with whether or not people are decent human beings.  I would say, however, that if you do consider yourself a believer and it ain't important enough for you to be at services any of the other 50 weeks a year, well...not sure it would make that much difference to any deity I'd care to believe in whether or not your butt was in a seat for one of the big 2 Sundays.  At that point, I'd think you might as well continue being whatever kind of human you are the other 50 weeks a year wherever you normally go about doing it without worrying too much about putting on a bonnet and pastels, but maybe that's just me.

One final observation, however: any person with the most casual and nodding acquaintance with religion knows that churches fill up quickly on Christmas and Easter mornings.  If you show up ten minutes LATE for one of those services, expect both full pews and incredulous stares when you wander in and start looking for a seat.

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We had our traditional Easter morning of o-dark-thirty wakeup (well, 0630, but that's still early enough) followed by Easter basket hunting.  Even the resident teenaged boy still gets into it, surprisingly.  Taking a leaf from my parents' book while I was growing up, we put together individual treasure hunts for each kid's basket, complete with codes and puzzles.  Petunia had cryptograms to solve, each leading her to the next plastic egg and clue.  Thing Two's code was a lettershift cipher that resulted in words with scrambled letters, so his was slightly more complicated than Petunia's.  He got stuck on a word or two, but in general breezed through his series of eggs to his basket just as she did.

I changed things up a bit for Thing One, however.   Yesterday, while watching Petunia scrambling for eggs at our town's Easter Egg Hunt, he looked wistfully at me and observed that he wished he could participate too (the cutoff is fifth grade, so it was even the last year for her.)  On the spot I decided that I was going to redo things for him this year so that he had to find all of his eggs first and then figure out what to do with them, as opposed to having one egg lead him to the next as we've usually done.  And I recalled with glee that I had the PERFECT eggs for him on hand already.

        
So, this morning, one of these little beauties was waiting for him outside his bedroom door. I told him there were seven more just like it hidden downstairs and to get busy looking.  As a side note, the best place to hide these was six inches over his head on doorframes.  Absolutely priceless how long it took him to find those.  :)

Each egg was numbered and contained the names of two professional soccer players.  The puzzle involved figuring out the country of origin of each player and knowing its capital city, thus combining his loves of soccer and geography into one puzzle.  He got his egg hunt after all, he had a lot of fun doing it, and he found his basket.  I call that a win, especially for a nearly fifteen year-old boy!

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Whatever you are celebrating today, enjoy: Easter, Passover or just a quiet Sunday morning.  There's enough room in the world for all three.