Weekend recap

Man, this one was a doozy! 

On Saturday, Brendan played 2 games up at Lodi at 11:30 and 2:00.  They played the first game against CSA, and beat them 9-1!!  It was so cool!  They've had a lot of changes going on over the past month or two.  A bunch of their players have either moved to a different team with the same club, or moved to another club entirely.  We were already operating on something of a skeleton crew, so we felt those changes pretty acutely.  But, on the bright side, we've had four or five talented young men join the team recently.  Although that is awesome and exciting, it takes awhile for the boys to get used to playing with each other.  They've only trained together 3 or 4 times leading up to this tournament.  Add in the transition from indoor to outdoor (HUGE field size difference, different rules, etc.), and this weekend could have been a disaster.  So, we were really proud of the way they played the first game, and pleasantly surprised by the outcome.

We played the second game against the Internationals - a really tough team.  Add in the fact that one of our former players is now playing with them, and the boys were really hoping for a victory.  Although they played hard, they made a few mistakes, and ended up losing 2-1.  The weather was lovely, but we forgot sunscreen, and now we are all a lovely shade of pink.

We came home, raced through dinner, and went to the Palace Theatre downtown.  Nate's school had reserved the entire theater for a private showing of one of my favorites: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe!  It was so cool!  That theater is amazing, and they have done such a great job conserving and modernizing it without losing its essential charm and character!  The PTO did a raffle before the movie, and Nate won an enormous (and highly coveted) stuffed lion!  He was so excited!  You could just hear his little voice ring out "THAT'S ME!" as soon as they read off the numbers, lol.  Brendan ran into a friend of his, and they took turns sneaking out of the theater during the showing to eat Turkish Delight.

Afterward, we stopped for ice cream at Taggart's, and enjoyed some delicious Bittners.  One of Nate's friends was so tired, she fell asleep on the table.  We didn't make it home and in bed until 10pm, after having left the house at around 9am. 

Sunday morning they had a third game, against a Pennsylvania team populated mostly by 6'4" giants, one of whom barreled through the line of parents sitting on the sidelines and nearly ended up in my lap.  The other team got two goals against us in about 2 minutes.  We rallied back with one goal later in the game, but it wasn't enough.  That was the only goal scored against that team in the entire tournament!  With one win and two losses, we weren't eligible to move on to the semi-finals, so we headed home to enjoy the lovely afternoon.  Nate and I walked down to the school playground and swung on the swings for a bit, and then came home and took a nap.  Mike made dinner on the grill just before the rain storm rolled in, and now we're enduring the Ridiculous Olympics until bedtime, which, for me, will be sometime around 1am thanks to that nap.

We had such a great time!  Next weekend is more of the same.  Kind of trying to decide if it's even worth it to get the boat out of storage this year.