Gorillas and Jellyfish

Fall 2015 Youth Soccer started in September.  Last spring, a shadowy cabal of Grattan parents divvied up the 1st grade players, resulting in an unprecedented FOUR 2nd grade teams - 2 boys' and 2 girls' teams.  It's sort of this monster that feeds itself - the more kids who play soccer, the more their friends want to play soccer; compounded with the difficulty of getting your kids on a team, so once they start you are loathe to give up your spot.

So, long story short, Brennan is now a Gorilla.

This league is a little more serious - we have to show up early for attendance and uniform checks, they keep score, the kids can't sit with their families, and the referee is not someone's parent who is simultaneously coaching the team.  Halfway through the season, the teams are re-matched to keep things competitive, which is nice if your kids are spending the season getting shellacked - or doing the shellacking.

Brennan is not the most, ah, dynamic member of the team, but I do like how he seems to be smiling and having fun throughout the games.

 

So Brennan's got a new coach, and some new teammates, and has practice on Tuesdays, when we're at work.  And we're off the hook, because this soccer thing was just going to last a year, until the kids formed single gender teams, right?

Not quite.  I thought this could wait until Lucie started kindergarten, but she relentlessly wore Daddy down ("When is it my turn for socccer?  When, Daddy?" x 1,000).  So the Jellyfish have been rebranded for the little siblings and preschool classmates, with Daddy coaching and Mommy fruitlessly trying to get half a dozen 4-year-olds the 2 blocks from school to practice on time every Wednesday.

 

While it feels like fall has been soccer, soccer, and more soccer - have I mentioned the hours Daddy devoted to designing the snazzy uniforms, not only for Bren & Lu, but for the other teams, too? - but we have found time for some other pursuits.

                            

Lucie's riding lesson has somehow morphed from a one-time consolation prize to something ongoing. She just likes it so much, and the people at Crystal Clear Farm are so nice, I can't bring myself to call a stop to it.  

Also, it gives me an excuse to go to this awesome bakery  in Petaluma.  They have lattes with honey AND lavender.  Also they have the stones to charge $5 for toast and jam, so you can't just laugh at San Francisco for causing the artisanal toast problem.

So pray for rain, I guess - not only will it end the drought, but it will give me an out on the lessons and limit my pastry intake.

...and then of course there's always LEGO.  This is - I think - a Snow Speeder that Ezra Bridger is piloting.  You know, Ezra, from Star Wars Rebels.  Yeah, me neither.  But we did submit this to the LEGO magazine, as I finally figured out how that was done - although not necessarily how to explain the odds of being one of 6 kids out of a bazillion who wind up IN the magazine.

I also got an impromptu vacation the first week of September, thanks to a rogue fallopian tube that decided to get all twisted around.  I woke up one Sunday feeling sort of terrible, rallied for a planned day in Healdsburg, felt better, came home, and had a sudden return of feeling terrible while biking with the kids.  I tried laying down and waiting for the pain to go away, but 4 hours later, decided it would be best to go the ER.  My doctors were really great - fallopian tube torsion is pretty uncommon (I'd never heard of it, anyway) and the only things I could tell them were: 1) I had abdominal pain that was worse on the right; 2) I'm going to throw up again; 3) My morphine has worn off.  But they got it figured out and laparoscopically removed in under 24 hours.  Friends have pointed out that taking a cab to the ER might have been safer and more cost effective than driving myself and using the parking garage, but I wasn't thinking all that clearly at the time.

ANYHOO - here a couple of pics from our day in Healdsburg before all that went down.  The irony of the egg photos is unintentional.