Soccer season starts

It's soccer season again!!

This year, the girls wanted to play, so that makes five of the seven kids into soccer stars. We are still playing at the Christian Youth Center and Paul coaches one of the teams. With those things in our favor, we managed to get all 5 kids (3 different teams) practicing on the same night. Yay! And all the games are on Saturday morning. Yay, again!!

The girl team is so cute, and so, well... girly. At the first game, they looked more like little ballerinas than soccer players. Even having the three older brothers in soccer didn't prepare them for the push and shove of getting to the ball. After a few minutes, Ellie caught the hang of it. She joined the mob of kids huddled around the moving ball. They looked like a swarm of bumblebees migrating along with the ball. (The yellow jerseys help with the word picture too :)

Grace, on the other hand, just stood on the outside of the mob, looking in. I'm not sure that she got the idea of exactly what she was supposed to do. What? Get in there and kick at someone's shin to steal something that someone else is kicking? And risk getting MY shins kicked? She finally caught on in the last few minutes of the game and gave the free ball a good whallop.

At one point in the game, Ellie was just kind of standing out in the field kicking at the ground. I figured she had just ran out of enery and was giving up, that is, until Paul pointed out that her cleat's sole was half off her shoe and floppy. After going through the boys, those cleats have seen their last game.

We still had half of the game left, so Caleb ran up to the van to get the duct tape (the fix-all), and Paul had her good-as-new (almost) and back in the game in a flash. Good thing we didn't put the duct tape away because as we were finishing the game we had another shoe to fix. The same exact thing happened to Gracie's shoe!! Same foot! How does THAT happen?

We stopped at the resale shop on the way home and found some new (to us) cleats for Ellie and Grace got some extras that we had at home. Problem solved for now, but I'm guessing we'll need to keep that duct tape handy, just in case...