Soccer, Shopping and Home Repair

Kaitlyn recently began her soccer career.  We were very proud to take her to her first game.  We were also slightly apprehensive.  You see Kaitlyn is not the most persevering of our children, nor is she the most brave.  In fact you only have to look at her the wrong way and she is likely to burst into tears followed by a screaming fit for which, when asked, she will have no idea what the reason was.

She got all dressed up that Saturday morning and was extra happy to be on the purple shirt team (a fact that all but the one other girl on her team had probably been less than pleased about).

When we got to the field she had a 30 minute practice session with her team.  They did exercises like kicking the ball, running after the ball, chasing the ball into the neighbouring soccer field, jumping over the ball, tripping over the ball, trying to keep the ball away from the coach and sitting on the ball.

Finally the game was all set to begin.  At their age they don’t have a goalie and they only have 4 players at a time on each team.  Kaitlyn wasn’t picked to go on the field right away so she sat with the rest of her team on the sideline.  We watched as the two teams battled it out in the middle, each player trying desperately to get the ball off every other player regardless of their team colour.

Finally it was Kaitlyn’s turn to join the fray.  She jumped up and bounded onto the field, I got out the camera to film the auspicious moment.  5 seconds later she was on the ground in a crying heap having butted heads with another player.  The boy whose head she had bumped had not even noticed the accident, much less fallen down. 

She was picked up and ushered to the side of the field by the coach who was looking around for her parents.  He finally found us, we were the ones laughing our heads off and trying to keep the camera steady so as not to miss one second of the action.

We stopped laughing, helped her retie her shoes and calmed her down so she was eventually able to make it into the game.  She did very well too.  We were surprised with her fearlessness on the attack, she had a blast and was very proud that she had scored 3 goals.  She was slightly confused when she asked the coach at the end which team had won and was told that it was a draw.  She had been carefully counting the goals for both sides and was sure that 6 to 2 was not a draw.  Doesn’t bode well for her mathematics lesson at school.

Saturday mornings for us are now very busy.  Emily goes to an ice skating class very early which I take her to.  Then James gets the rest of the girls ready to go to Kaitlyn’s soccer game.  Emily and I meet them there in time to watch the action and I try to make sure Emily has proper clothes on instead of watching the game in a skating dress, which looks totally fine on the ice but a little out of place on the soccer sidelines.  It takes the whole family working together as a team to get us all in the right places at the right times.

One Saturday afternoon following all this busyness I needed to go and do some grocery shopping and James decided to take the kids over to a friend’s house for a little while.  They live just around the corner and he was confident that they could walk home afterwards.  I dropped them off on my way to the shops.  I got done with my shopping and was starting to head back home.  We have this GPS location thing on our phones so that we can locate each other.  I looked at where James was and saw that he was still at our friend’s house.  I called him to tell him I was on my way home and could swing by and pick him up.  He didn’t answer his phone. 

I kept trying to call James as I drove home and as I got closer I noticed that his dot had moved back to our house.  I thought it was pretty fast for him to get home but I still couldn’t get him to answer his phone.

When I got home there he was in the house.  He looked a little sheepish and explained that our friend had given him a ride home but that he hadn’t had his keys with him.  Since I had the car with the garage door opener he had had to break into the house.  I asked how he had done this and he said that the doors to the basement were able to be opened from the outside and he was able to get into the basement and from there into the house (its ok he fixed that oversight in home security).

What was worrisome about this plan was that the door from the basement into the house has a chain on it to stop small children from tumbling down the basement steps.  He explained that he had been forced to break the chain in order to free himself from the bowels of the house.  Unfortunately the chain was a rather sturdy one and instead the woodwork to which it was attached had broken. 

He was quick to tell me that he had wasted no time though, and had already glued it all back together and it was practically good as new, I believe the words “a bit of paint and you’ll never know” actually escaped his lips.  He stood there looking every bit like a little boy caught next to the empty cookie jar but proud of the fact that he had cleaned up the crumbs for his mother.

My answer to all of this was one simple question that very effectively burst his bubble and made him seriously question his very high IQ.  My question was this.  “So, is your car actually locked right now?”

You see his car was sitting in the driveway and inside the car was a second handy dandy garage door opener.