Soccer and Snakes

First, Soccer. Jillian started soccer at Soccer World this week. This is the activity she selected for the Fall (in addition to the required swim lessons), which sort of surprised me, but she has been insisting on it for so long. I love Soccer World already, because their registration is month by month and they don't require any shin guards or special equipment. This is great for us because I have no clue how long this interest will last, as my child has a long list of activities she wants to try. Right now. Anyway, on Tuesday morning we headed over to check out the class (poor Adrienne, stuck watching her sister's activity-of-choice. Again.) and I have to say I was really impressed. Coach Kevin was just about as awesome and enthusiastic as you could hope for, and he had a nicely paced class with lots of water breaks, and the perfect amount of skill-teaching mixed with fun, less structured activities. Jillian loved her first day, and really did well overall. She was aggressive (not surprising), but also crafty (occasionally tried to use her hands to secure the ball before kicking it away). We definitely need to work on toning down the drama, because the emotional response to someone appropriately stealing the ball from her was full of crossed arms, heavy sighs, falling on the ground, and shouting "hey, not fair!".  We'll work on that. She also found all the running to be quite exhausting, which really amused me because she has more energy than any one person I've ever met.

Adrienne watching drills. You can see Jillian in the yellow pants

A bunch of preschoolers kicking soccer balls around. Glad I was behind the glass.

Coach Kevin, giving Team Orange Juice a pep talk (they did beat Team Blueberry)

Both girls heading out to the middle to get a stamp at the end of class. Coach Kevin invited Adrienne out to get one, too.

And now, snakes. It has become clear to me that Adrienne has a very loose definition of what a snake actually is. Just before nap on Thursday, she was doing her usual sit-on-the-toilet-forever-to-avoid-any-sort-of-legitimate-rest-period-and-make-her-mother-crazy routine, when she stood up and looked down into the toilet, noticed her success, and exclaimed, "Oh there's a big snake in there!" (referring to her successful "job") before sitting down to "push out another big poopy".  Later that night, Matt was bathing the girls when he noticed Adrienne moving her mouth around all funny and scrunching up her face. He asked her what was wrong and she said, "Oh, there's just a snake in my mouth". The offending 'snake' just so happened to be a hair. I'm still laughing every time I think of both of these instances.