While I certainly can’t say that a forty-five minute bout of chaotic soccer with Mama by your side is considered independence, it is something now isn’t it?  In my eyes it is blissfully sad and still, I am mourning the happiness from our sporty evening.  Oh it went something like this…

4:45- I was pondering a six p.m start time in a town about 25 miles away… and exactly how to deal with the impending meal.  In my mind a little peanut butter and honey, some leftovers of butter beans and rice and a bunch of snacks to and from would suffice.  Of course time slipped away, as it so often does, tying shoes and finding shorts, changing diapers, and chasing dogs and before I knew it, it was 5:20.  We had to go!  And how!  So, I hoisted the boys over my shoulder and made the mad dash.  I remembered the snacks were still in the kitchen so I headed back.  I plopped down the littlest boy on the one tiny stair that goes to the entrance of our house and hoped and hoped Miles didn’t wander while I jetted in as fast as my mama legs could go to retrieve the cups.  I swiftly made it back just in the knick of time to watch Rowan teeter off that step and take a good tumble onto the ground below.  I picked him up and rocked him silently cursing myself, when the dog escaped and the words I hoped I would never have to hear seeped out of Miles lips, “Rowan fell into chicken poop.”  Oh dear.

5:22- I buckled Miles in.  I gathered up the dog.  Took my stinky but calm baby indoors to clean him up.  I managed a little positive affirmation in between sighs of exasperation and a few hidden chuckles as well.

5:30- On the road.  We were going to make it, and I was determined not to let on that I have a deeply ingrained fear of arriving late.  Surely you can imagine the tension I create in my brain when arriving mere minutes late?  It is frustrating and I hope that I can knock it off one of these days.

6:01- Success.  It was a bit farther that I had imagined, but I see parents with little ones in tote scurrying to the field.  We manage to form a little huddle (a sports terminology I picked up tonight… clearly I have not been active in team sports so far in this life) and I stared at my shoes with Rowan in the backpack and Miles clinging to my hand.

6:10- Turns out the lot of us were waiting in the wrong location so I had to toss Miles up over my shoulder once again and bounce the two of them across the parking lot and onto the adjacent field.  Someone threw a soccer ball and some impossibly tiny shin guards our way and hollered at us to form a line.  A line?  A line.  3 year olds lining up.  I had to giggle.  Most of these kids had probably never heard of such a thing.  Or at least mine had not.  I hustled him this way and that, while the other parents did the same.  There was an onslaught of photography going on.  I refused to join the pack for some odd reason.  I suppose I figured the shots would be better in a few weeks when they got in the swing of things.

7.  The overall feeling was relief.  We made it.  Miles was happy.  Who cares if he refused to attempt the “soccer dance” (what they make you do if you touch the ball with your hands).  I had to stare down a little girl (a foot taller than Miles) who marched up to him, stomped her foot, and announced, “I am bigger than you.”  Come on girly, he makes up for it in style and charm.  Don’t you know nothing?

Ok, I suppose I took a couple…

Ah… so starting the age of planned activites is not something I feel completely ready to embrace.  I beleive this will be the only thing interupting our calm, quiet, subdued afternoons.  And it turns out, those are just the way we like it.  So long as you can through in the occasional soccer dance of course.