highlights of 2007...

Today was such a gloomy day with the wind, rain and just plain cold...  I thought I would try to organize my digital photos into files so I could find my pictures easier.  Well, it didn't turn out that way.  I just enjoyed looking at my pictures and remembering the good times of this past year.  So thought I would share some of them here...  Who knows, this will probably be the closest I get to a family newsletter this year...

We are becoming a family interested in sports now.  We learned about football... Lucas played football this year for his first time.  It was a fantastic season.  They won all their games, except their first one.  Ended up in the playoffs and won the first game.  But they went to the Championships and ended up in second place.  They played every game with everything they had and didn't quit.   This made it stressful on the parents though.  Four minutes left in the 4th quarter and they are just yards away from the end zone and the other team has the ball.  Somehow though, the boys came together and would stop the other team from scoring.  It felt like every game ended this way.  But due to such a wonderful coaching staff and a fun bunch of boys, Lucas had a great experience and is looking forward to playing again next year.  Tom nicknamed him "Dozer" so he could bulldoze through the line.  The name stuck.  It was pretty cool to be on the sideline and hear other parents, coaches, some guy taking pictures, yelling "Go get 'em Dozer!"  

Tom went to practically every practice and made every game he could.  He missed a couple because of cub scout camps, but otherwise he was right there on the sidelines.  Parents helped out with the home games and Tom quickly discovered that being on the "chain gang" was the best seat in the house.  But at one point, he would get more into the game and forget to move with the guy on the other end of the chain.....   That guy would be running down the field and then suddenly tug because Tom was still standing still.  Ok - I thought it was pretty funny....

I helped some with the team too.  I wrote articles for the local newspaper about the saturday games.  I had no idea what to write so it made sense as to what was happening during the games...  So the coaches gave me a cheat sheet for each game of what plays the players made.  I summarized it and sent it in the newspaper.  The writer there then did his magic and turned my summaries into something that sounded like a sports announcer and you could feel like you had just seen the game...  Due to the Youth Football League being so big this year, they weren't printed in the paper but the articles for each game were posted on the paper's website each week.  That was pretty cool.

Jake played lacrosse in the spring.  Another sport

we knew nothing about...  I love this close up picture of him - yes, that is his hair sticking out of his helmet.  It is one of the few pics of Jake that I have where he does not have perma-grin.  His coaches said the same thing about him a

ll season - "Jake, the other team won't be afraid of you if you don't stop smiling!"  That would just make him smile bigger.  Jake played defense because he loved to mess with the other team when they had the ball.  Sometimes the rules of the game were not clear, such as it is not ok to hit, but it is ok to whack, just not from behind..  Or was it, it is ok to hit....  Anyway, Jake  just liked to try to knock the ball out of the other player's stick by tipping theirs with his.  This  was a very aggressive game, a combo of soccer, hockey and football all together.  A bunch of boys running around with sticks.  But boy was it fun to watch.  They had a good season and lots of fun.  There was a tournament at the end of the season and they played 3 games.  They won two of the three and came in second for the tournament.  Looks like both boys now want to go out this spring.  Biggest thing I noticed was that when these kids in both of these sports took their gear off, I didn't recognize any of them.  Jake would be talking to a kid after the game towards the parking lot and I would say, "That was a nice kid.  Who was that?"  He would tell me, "Mom, that was Ryan - he plays on my team."  When they are running around like little storm troopers and all look the same, I need the numbers to know who is who.  In football, they had their names on the jerseys so that helped.  But once there were in street clothes, I didn't know who was who....  Anyway, both sports were good experiences for the boys and something different for them since this is the first "team" sport they have played.  Tae Kwon Do is more of an individual sport and they haven't done that now in some time.  

Well, I think I will break up our highlights of '07 over the next couple of days.  The pictures are loading pretty slowly and the dryer is buzzing, my tea water is hot(I am so hooked on tea now - thank you Shauna!), the boys are watching a SciFi movie so I may just go to bed.  Call it a night.  Til tomorrow then....