Happy is the boy

Ben had his second soccer game last night and the Blue Dragons were smokin! They played the white team and the match was pretty equal, final score was 4-4! The didn't have any extra players so everyone was in the whole time but they did good trying to call out to each other and look for open players before kicking, so refreshing after several seasons of mobball on the other league. It's been great to see Ben's enthusiasm about the sport renewed and he is really improving technically as well. Coach Theressa is hoping all the players/parents will be interested in doing a tournament in October in Imlay City since the team is coming together so well. Below are some shots from the first two games. Ethan is learning what it's like to be there to support his brothers as they do their activities which is a switch from them always having to wait somewhere while he does gymnastics or baseball.

Monday after school North Branch hosted a middle school cross-country meet. The day was long, it was hot, and the course laid out had several hills. Fox held in there and finished 21st out of 24 runners (boys/there were 11 girls that ran) with a time of 23:11 and received his first medal. Seven teams participated. He was beaming. Tuesday, however was a different story. North Branch hosted the county meet for high school and middle school, again after a full day of classes, thankfully a cloud cover came in and it was a little cooler. He finished, admitted he walked some, but after 3 meets in 4 days I couldn't blame him a bit.

As our first week zooms right along, everyone has been diligent in getting their work done when they have the time, since gymnastics was waylaided for the meet on Monday we were home earlier than usual so Ben and Ethan got busy on their homework packets. Ethan is finished but didn't turn it in yet so we can quiz him on spelling words and Ben is almost done. Fox had a little confusion with his math assignment, not the material, but what was due, and did more than he had to so now he can kick back for a couple days because he's ahead of the game. One speed bump for him is .... cursive .... apparently their spelling tests need to be done in cursive, which he is not fluent in so he's a little slow taking the time with it; on a pretest even though he knew all the words he didn't get them written down in time because of the cursive requirement. I object! In my opinion this antiquated form should be dismissed, the future of these children is all about keyboarding, who uses cursive anyway other than for a signature. Have you ever had a potential employer say the application has to be filled out in cursive?

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I feel like Picaso in his blue period lately, it seems that 80% of the schools in Michigan have blue as one of their school colors plus many of the soccer uniforms are some shade of blue too. lol Oh well, it's supposed to be a calming, healing color, so that's cool. Seems like the days are flying by for me as I write, make calls, take care of domestic doings; I just hit a stride and look at the clock then its time to go pick everybody up. Happy to be busy with good things though.