Soccer: Year One Down

Emry has the athletic look and build I wish I had. She also has the fearlessness to try new things I had when I was five. Combined, she proved to make a pretty good soccer player. Which I had supposed she would.

 

Okay, no we’re not ready to take on the World Cup. And the United States Soccer Women’s team being what it is…well, I’m not going to encourage that level of sports. She still doesn’t grasp all the concepts of the game. It will take her a lot of practice to really be good. Playing as a team is always elusive at age five. And she has to get rid of some of her little OCD habits. However, by game 7 of 8, she was a roll. Not only did she achieve eight goals, but she was also playing good defense for the first time. She went after the ball. She took the ball away from the other team. She played a good game.

 

Then game 8 rolled around, and she barely got two goals. She couldn’t seem to get her head in the game, and we had at least two rounds of tears. I didn’t know how we were going to overcome this slump except…well, a trophy works wonders. Her very first trophy! And, boy, was she proud!

 

I’m still not overly fond of soccer, but we’ll probably be back on the field next year. Emry will want to play again, and Ethan will be four so he can also play. All I can say is: watch out world!

 

Our little soccer player.

 

Playing defense.

 

Emry and her friends Autumn and Alexis with their trophies. (And Autumn’s brother Jacob as the photo bomb!)

Kids!

Sharing stories of my kids may bore some of my readers. But I share them for two reasons: 1) they’re usually quite cute, and 2) I don’t want to forget the funny things they did and writing them down helps me remember.

 

Ethan:

 

This past weekend, I took the kids out to my parents house for a “Mug Party”. (Interpretation: my mom was cleaning out her kitchen cabinets and wanted us all to collect the mugs that belong to us and take them out of her house.) On the way home that evening, the kids noticed the moon “following us” in the sky. I can remember being that age and thinking the same thing. Usually when they point this out, Ed teases them and says in a funny voice, “That’s no moon – that’s a space station!” But Ed was at work that night, so he wasn’t with us. However, Ethan took up the torch and stated loudly:

 

“Papa would say: That’s no moon – that’s a gas station!”

 

Emry:

 

I don’t like peas. My mom says I did when I was very young, but I can’t remember ever liking peas. Hence, my kids have had them but once or twice and probably at Grandma’s house. They certainly haven’t eaten them enough to even know what they are.

 

But I do like The Princess and the Pea. It’s one of my favorite fairy tales. And while I have read them a very different version of this, I haven’t read the actual story to my kids. Tonight we were reading another version of the story where pigs play they main characters and nearly every other word starts with the letter “P”. We got through the whole story and Emry even giggled at the funny parts, but just as I closed the book, she asked:

 

“Mom, what’s a pea?”

Happy 38^thBirthday, Katey!

My little sister: age 5

American History 101

Being a homeschool mom is not the easiest task in the world…and I’ve only got one to teach…and it’s first grade. But already I am being stretched. I flip through her science book and sigh at the little experiments with magnets or fingerprints. Really? Do we have to do the experiments? Can’t we just read it? Or her vast interest (and talent ) in all things art. Since art was never my favorite class, I bought an art book to keep me on task. But wouldn’t that half hour be better spent reading a good book? In Emry’s opinion: no.

 

But one thing I don’t have to stretch myself in is history. It delights the very depths of my soul when she expresses a desire to see the Statue of Liberty or Washington Monument. I can’t wait to show her all the things I desired to see when I was in first grade. In fact, her history book seems too short…but it sure is informative!

 

We are only a few weeks into it, of course, so probably about 10 pages. But already we have covered things Americans seem to have forgotten: the freedom to worship and the freedom to assemble.

 

I’m sure all of you remember what happened in March. A virus shut our world down – including church. And while I don’t have all the correct answers to how the church should have responded, I do know this: I was very sad at how quickly the church closed its doors in response to a government mandate that took away one of our Constitutional rights. We have the right to worship as we please. We have the right to assemble. And nowhere does it say a virus (or anything else) can take away those rights from us, even temporarily.

 

As I was reminded of that, I was also struck by how the book explained to Emry our freedom to assemble. It stated very simply that we have the right to gather in a group (assemble) and, within those assemblies, state what it is we are assembling about (protest) as long as no one gets hurt.

 

Emry, at the age of five, is not equating the freedom of worship to being away from church for four months. And she certainly doesn’t understand the significance of the freedom of assembling in relation to Black Lives Matter (which she knows nothing about) and the physical harm these protests are causing so many. But I did. And it crossed my mind that perhaps every leader in the United States of America needs a copy of Emry’s first grade history book.

My Husband

The other day in the midst of some conversation, I mentioned something I did in elementary school around 1991. 

 

“You were in elementary school in 1991?” my husband responded, somewhat surprised.

 

“Yes,” I replied. “I turned eleven.”

 

He paused for a moment and the said, “I was driving then.”

 

Today is Ed’s 46^thbirthday. In a lot of ways, that doesn’t seem all that much older than my 40 years. After all, we are now both in same decade. But sometimes we have conversations like the above and it makes you realize that six years can be a significant difference. 

 

When Ed’s Aunt Sandy passed away a couple of months ago, his cousins and he started passing around pictures via text, e-mail, and Facebook. Sadly, Ed does not have a lot of pictures from when he grew up, but he pulled out the ones we had scanned onto a zip drive when we were in North Carolina and started going through them. Here is my husband in his senior picture in 1993:

 

Yes, mullet and all – a hairstyle his wise Aunt Sandy told him he would regret. I shook my head at it.

 

“If I had known you then, I wouldn’t have married you,” I stated. “I would have agreed with Aunt Sandy.”

“She was right,” he admitted. “I should have never had a mullet.”

 

But, I have to say, I might have married this cute little guy:

 

 

Of course, I wasn’t even born when that picture was taken!

Theodore Roosevelt

If I must choose between righteousness and peace – I choose righteousness.

 

This quote of 26^thPresident Theodore Roosevelt is one of many of his amazing quotes graven on the monoliths of his memorial in Washington, D.C. on Theodore Roosevelt Island. (A hidden gem in D.C. that I encourage anyone to stop and see. It’s a little out of the way, but as worth seeing as any of the monuments along the National Mall.) 

 

This past spring, as we were “quarantined”, I was sitting on my living room floor next to the heater one cold morning trying to warm up. My newest bookshelf is in that corner, so I did what I always do when I’m near words: read. Most of the books I have, of course, read. But as the library was closed, I was reading and re-reading my own collection. And my eyes fell on a book I had purchased at an old bookstore in New Hampshire one year by had never gotten around to reading: Fear God and Take Your Own Partby Theodore Roosevelt. I pulled it out and started skimming…and then wondered what the fearless Roosevelt would have to say about 2020 and his beloved nation’s response to a virus. Of course, I can’t say for sure but I’m pretty sure it would be scathing.

 

The book is a collection of articles he wrote around 1914, mostly in response to Woodrow Wilson’s “peace at all cost” response to what we now call World War I. It, too, is scathing. And clearly states the position America should have taken at the start of World War I, along with other mistakes the Wilson administration was making towards Mexico and regular protests arising around the country from what Roosevelt calls “hypehnated-Americans” (people who took great pride in being German-American or Irish-American instead of just plain old American). More than 100 years later…it would seem that while the issues may take on different terminology, some things never change.

 

As I read this book, I had to jot down some of my favorite parts. From peace vs. righteousness, to hard work, to duty, to the right of war…Theodore Roosevelt had plenty to say that is just as imperative today as it was in 1914.

 

“For a man to stand up for his own rights, or especially for the rights of somebody else, means that he must have virile qualities: courage, foresight, willingness to face risk and undergo effort. It is much easier to be timid and lazy. The average man does not like to face death and endure hardship and labor.”

 

“Peace is not the end. Righteousness is the end. When the Savior saw the money-changers in the Temple He broke the peace by driving them out. At that moment peace could have been obtained readily enough by the simple process of keeping quiet in the presence of wrong. But instead of preserving peace at the expense of righteousness, the Savior armed Himself with a scourge of cords and drove the money-changes from the Temple. Righteousness is the end, and peace a means to the end, and sometimes it is not peace, but war which is the proper means to achieve the end. Righteousness should breed valor and strength. When it does breed them, it is triumphant; and when triumphant, it necessarily brings peace. But peace does not necessarily bring righteousness.”

 

“Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time.”

 

“…there can be no greater waste of time than to debate about non-debatable things.”

 

“The hyphenated American of any type is a bad American and an enemy to this country.”

 

“A sillier falsehood has never been uttered than the falsehood that “war settles nothing”. War settled the independence of this country; war settled the question of union; war settled the question of slavery.”

 

“Such pacifism puts peace above righteousness, and safety in the present above duty in the present and safety in the future.”

 

“Moreover, though it is criminal for a nation not to prepare for war, so that it may escape the dreadful consequences of being defeated in war, yet it must always be remembered that even to be defeated in war may be far better than not to have fought at all.”

Three Months!!!

Today our little girl is three months old! She is such a little joy. She seems to grow every day, but I may think this because she is so much bigger than the other two were at the same age even though she is still tiny…and cute. 

 

Her little personality continues to broaden, her smiles are a delight and she loves to “talk”, especially to her Sock Monkey. I will put it near her and she starts to coo and chatter, almost as if she is telling it all her little secrets. She likes to blow bubbles. She appears to be doing crunches as she tries to sit up, knowing full well she can see more around her in a seated position than lying flat on her back. I now know what she was forever doing in my womb as she moved about, hardly ever still. For even when she is sleeping (especially if she falls asleep on her tummy), she moves herself all over her bed. Usually she is searching for her pacifier, which she can’t grab but is trying to somehow maneuver back into her mouth. I find her wedged in a corner, against a side, or completely turned around from where I put her. And I thought Ethan was a mover!

 

She has gotten on a good schedule: eat, play for an hour or hour-and-a-half, sleep a couple of hours…and do it all over again. In fact, she is so well trained in her schedule she thinks it is supposed to be like that all 24 hours…meaning she has yet to sleep consistently through the night. And while that leaves me exhausted some days, it also makes the days go along more smoothly!

 

So happy to be three months!

 

And her favorite toy: Sock Monkey!

Fishing

Do you remember your first fishing trip? I believe my first trip was at the age of five. My dad took me to a little pond on Uncle Mack’s property, which was just down the street from the house we lived in our first summer in Tennessee. I don’t remember a lot about the trip except I caught two fish and my dad caught one. When you’re five, it’s not how big the fish is or if you can even eat it…it’s all about catching more fish than your dad.

 

To be honest, after that, the only memories I have of actually fishing are a very fuzzy one at Callaway Gardens in Georgia and a couple of times on Beaver Lake in New Hampshire. And while I’m sure we went more often than that (because I do remember digging for worms in our garden in Tennessee), my sharpest memories of “fishing” are simply sitting on the front porch and practicing our casting. I always thought that was great fun.

 

Emry and Ethan have been dying to go fishing for quite a while. And we probably would have taken them sooner but Ed was going to take them to the pond where he works and it’s been off-limits since Covid. With the long weekend, the idea returned and he thought of the pond one of our pastor’s sons fishes in every spare moment he has. It’s a neighborhood pond, one those “green spaces” new neighborhoods are required to have per so many houses. But its stocked, doesn’t require a fishing license, and the kids could go with friends. So, after purchasing a few necessary items, Ed took the kids over there this for a morning their first fishing trip. Each of them caught one fish…and now they ask every day when they get to go fishing again!

 

Ed, Emry, Ethan and Ethan’s first fish.