Tip #13 - Enjoy the ride

Last year during soccer season, I think our little World Cup man and his team maybe won two games.  Maybe.  It was a miserable run but he kept his spirits up and tried to make the best of it.  Unfortunately, they lost so badly they were the most boring games of my life.  In today's second game, our little champion scored the first, then the second, then the THIRD, THEN THE FOURTH goal of the game.  I was in frozen awe at the end of the field.  Frozen I say not from disbelief or joy.  Frozen because the temperature was a balmy 45 degrees and the howling wind nudged that nearer to 40.  I was so cold that I missed the photo op at one and two and then sorta got a pic of three maybe four.  I did not miss the op because of frozen fingers but because selfishly I refused to let go of my hot chocolate - I'll just tell the family about it later.  Thankfully, I got a few more chances to redeem myself.  4-0 in a soccer game is a little tough to come back from (especially since it was within the first 10-15min. of the game) but I figured that the opposing team would rally and we would have a contest.  Actually, I was praying we would we have some kind of blood pumping, heart racing game since I was pretty sure I was going to go into hypothermia before half-time.  However it was not to be.  The coach immediately moved his top scorer to defense and then everyone else on our team had a crack at the goal.  We finally left the field, half frozen, ready to collapse from wind driven chill, numb head to toe (I would NOT have made a good pioneer) with the score of 14-0.  It was the most boring game of my life.

On another and not so boring note: Our little 10yr-old needed to complete a service project to receive his Webelos badge in Cub Scouts.  Noticing last night that our neighbors had mulch out in a pile in their driveway he decided that it would be nice to go over today and help spread it.  So this morning he suited up in rain gear, because of course it was raining, and borrowed our wheelbarrow and walked over with Dad to help out.  Our neighbor lady was already spreading mulch herself and was glad to see my family.  It turned out (and we had no idea previously) that our neighbors father had died only two days ago and he was in the house trying to deal with his crippling loss while his wife tried to deal with a gigantic pile of mulch that had to be spread that day or the rain was going to make it much harder to spread.  Sometimes angels appear in a burst of light, sometimes they appear on the road to Damascus and sometimes they appear as a 10yr-old boy pushing a wheelbarrow.