Soccer

I was going through my pictures tonight. It makes me sad that I have so many really good pictures, but haven't taken the time to throw them into my blog. So, I am going to make an real attempt over the next couple of weeks to get these pictures onto this blog. Because the pictures are covering about the last 6 months, some of the groupings might be kind of weird, but if it gets the pics on my blog, I'm happy.

We'll call this post "soccer". Over the last 6 months, the boys have all played soccer. The big boys played on a soccer team and Charlie took a few classes at the Park District. Some of the boys liked it more than others, some were more focused than others, some were more "gifted" than others, but all of them were very photogenic playing soccer. ;-)

We'll start with Charlie...

Charlie seemed very comfortable in his soccer class...

He learned a lot.

And, has shown a lot of improvement since he stopped crying everytime another kid kicked "his ball".

Ben, Jack and Drew played for the "sometimes green, sometimes yellow" team in our local rec league last spring.
They each learned quite a bit about soccer.

Drew is not particularly competitive (impossible, I know), but he found his own ways to focus on the game. "Mom, when I find myself getting distracted and thinking about Wipeout, I just start knocking myself in the head until I start thinking about soccer again."

Nice.

Jack happened to get a turn at goalie on the day that I brought my camera.

Isn't he a cute goalie?!?!

Ok, one of you needs to KICK THE BALL!!!

Ben really likes soccer a lot and decided that he would like to play on a more competitive, year-round team that started this fall. We were just going to sign him up for the rec. league again, but he convinced us that he wanted to try-out for this new team. He was very nervous and a little intimidated because the kids were a lot better than what he was used to, but, he showed the coaches that he had some descent soccer skills, a lot of potential and is an excellent listener and learner. He made the team, got fitted with a cool new uniform, got an awesome soccer bag and has already competed in a couple of tournaments. He likes to play defense and seems to be doing very well with it. Here is his "new" team. Pretty intimidating, eh? When he gets his soccer scholarship, we can all say that we knew him when...(click here for a funny Ben soccer story)