We recently finished soccer season. I meant to do a post on this a month ago, but I never got around to getting pictures of the kids playing because the last two game days were cancelled due to first, a tornado and second, a thousand year flood. I hate it one those things get in the way of soccer! Anyway, soccer was a godsend for our family this year. Oakley has had a difficult time making friends with this move. He is shy and he's a homebody and he refuses to make friends with guys because they're always too competitive. . . so he says. I know it's because Oakley is intimidated with sports because he feels like he isn't much of an athlete. We forced him to play soccer on the 13 year old boys team because the coach was the same as Gwynyth's 10 year old girls' team and they practiced with each other. They ended up loving it and did exceptionally well considering they've played very little compared to the other players. In fact, the coaches told me that Oakley was one of the very best athletes on the team. He was definitely the fastest kid on the team. Gwynyth is a natural athlete and an excellent player, but likes to look beautiful and cool on the field and sometimes that sort of undermines her soccer skills :).
Diamond was excellent, but his coach didn't like him and yelled mean things at him throughout the games and practice. We quit taking him to practices and during the games, it was all I could do not to march over and yell mean things right back at the coach. Diamond just didn't understand all of the rules. He understood that the ball needed to be kicked down field and put into the little net at the end. Period. It took several games for Diamond to figure that out, but when he did, he opened a serious little black can of whoop-a**, making sometimes up to five or six goals per game. Unfortunately, Diamond has some residual effects of the orphanage's Lord of the Flies mentality and after every goal would yell at his teammates, "Ha-ha, I have five goals and you haven't scored any." We had to have a talk. "Diamond," I said, "first of all you don't trash talk ever, second, if you by chance mess up and trash talk, definitely DO NOT trash talk your own teammates, dude!"
Florence and Sophia were on the same team. Sophia does not do anything she does not want to do, so some games when she wasn't in the mood she just picked grass. Some days she embodied a six year old female Beckham and the girl would charge down the field and score leaving dust at her heels. . . but mostly she picked grass. Sometimes her coach would put her in as goalie, which was far too mundane and menial for Sophia, so in the middle of the game she would call for Florence. "Florence," I heard her yell on more than one occasion, "the coach wants you to be goalie now." Poor Florence, would giggle, "okay" and skip back to the goal unaware that she had just been conned into taking the most boring position in six year old soccer.
Florence, sweet beautiful girl that she is, is not always the sharpest tool in the shed. (Okay, let's just be honest here, the child is a closet blonde!) Florence really does suffer from learning disabilities and one of her problems is remembering and following multiple sequential directives. It took us several games to get her to understand that she couldn't just kick it into either goal, there was a specific one for her team. Finally, Brian and I decided to simplify it way down like we did with Diamond. Brian said to her one day, "Florence, see that goal down there [he points very specifically to eliminate all possible confusion] kick the ball in there and don't let anyone get the ball from you." That's all it took. Florence is an incredible athlete with rippling muscles all over that little powerhouse body. She was a mean machine after that. . . well, a mean machine with a cheek to cheek, bubbly smile. That's when we decided to name her Florence Gump. When we asked her, "Why did you kick that ball in that goal, Florence?" She said, "Because you told me to, Daddy!" After that, at the games, we all yelled, "Run, Florence, run!"
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