Ninja Bus

2-9-15

Is it bad when getting to work means I actually get to relax a bit?

It has been a crazy last three days. Not bad, but jam packed with activity. I knew it would be, but you don’t realize the toll it will take on your body. I feel like there is a little bit of cold coming back into my head and I am not thrilled about this. It just means I need to rock some NyQuil at night for a couple nights so I can get good sleep.

Thursday I got to meet our new team. It was an incredibly great group of kids and I was charmed by all of them. Of course I had my couple of Firefoxes there, but it was also cool to have some John Adams kids that the boys knew. There were also two kids who had never played in an organized fashion before. I could tell they certainly had some skills.

Even though it was girls and boys together, you would have never known this. The girls held their own and all of them seemed to work really well together. We had the kids play a game of freeze tag that involved making it that two people had to tag a frozen person to free them. It was a team building exercise that they loved. Then they did a scrimmage. It was a lot of fun.

We took a couple of color suggestions and had them vote. Then they came up with team names. The result is the Blue Water Dragons! I almost considered doing my hair blue for them. Instead, I have a couple of dragon hats in my Amazon cart that will hopefully be ordered this week.

Friday morning arrived and I was all excited. I made lunches for the boys and myself. I labeled Bobby’s paper sack and then mine which read “Mama Brenan”. My mom showed up around 8:30 and we drove up to the school where we parked behind the bus ready to follow it down to San Luis Obispo.

The drive was really fun since my mom and I got to chat the whole time without kid interruptions. It was also an adventure in itself what with the Ninja Bus! We had been following it close behind and at one point it was in the incredibly crowded lane going to the 710. Our directions indicated that we would take the 405 to the 5. So instead of staying in the trafficy lane, we went around the bus. We knew that even if they had some kind of secret route, we would meet up with them at the Mission itself, so we were not too concerned. We didn’t expect for the bus to randomly materialize in front of us not too far from our destination. It was surreal!

My mom and I were put in charge of 17 kids. They were all kids from Mrs. Brewer’s class and Bobby. Luckily we knew a couple of the kids since they are good friends of Bobby’s. Plus, the rest were really nice. Sadly, our tour guide was a crotchety old bird that was clearly not accustomed to dealing with kids. As we followed her on the tour, she snipped at the kids several times. I would understand if they were being awful, but at one point she told this group of fourth graders that they needed to stop moving around so much because it was distracting. The only moving around they were doing was to look at all of the things in the small room we were in. She wanted them to only pay attention to her. It was crazy.

Sadly, there is never enough time on a field trip to see everything. We only had maybe 90 minutes to see things. The chapel was gorgeous and I would have loved to look at more things. It was ok, though, especially since this Sunday I get to go to a different mission and we can take our time.

After I arrived home, Ken and I drove up to pick up both boys from the school. At that point we headed over to Hull where we needed to finish the measuring of the fields for Spring League. It wasn’t a hard task, but it is exhausting and tedious. We were there for about 3 hours but it was done and ready for the morning.

Saturday came quickly and we were back at Hull by 7:30. There was field set up along with the 150 soccer balls that needed to be inflated. I sat at an outlet by the gym and using the air compressor filled maybe two thirds of the balls with help from Bobby and Dax. When we were done, we were under the region tent for only a little while before we were heading over to our field for the game.

And what a game it was!

The Water Dragons won 5 to 2. They all played together so incredibly well that Ken was actually a little concerned we were too good. In fact, both their goals were offsides that Ken just let through because he didn’t want a blow-out. The best part of the game, though, was the incredible goal Dax scored. It was an amazing play and a gorgeous shot. I loved watching him run back down the field in victory. Of course, this was nothing compared to his grin and sprint to me at half time to jump up into my arms. Pride beamed off me!

My folks took the boys after the game and they got to go to Mulligans and not have to deal with a 4 hour AYSO planning meeting. In all fairness, the meeting was filled with a lot of laughs and a lot of work was done. I ended up leading about an hour of it with budget talks. It was actually much smoother than expected and we were able to come up with some really good numbers. I will go through them this week, if not today, and send out the almost final draft.

Right before we left the meeting, Aaron called Ken asking when we were coming to the party. We had not planned on it until 8 since this was when the invite said. Instead, we were encouraged to come over as soon as we could so that Aaron could sing. You see, the party was dubbed Sing Club and it was karaoke which was AWESOME. Everyone was expected to sing and we all had so much fun! It was loud and my throat was toast afterwards, but totally worth every second. I think we ended up leaving around 11, but I know there were people there until well after 3 am.

Thankfully Sunday was mostly a day of rest. Sure, some laundry was worked on and I helped Bobby with his mission report, but over all I know I spent a lot of time on the couch watching How I Met Your Mother, which was awesome since I got to introduce Stephanie to the show that I adore so much. Even with all of this down time, I was beat so I crawled into bed around 6:30 in order to be at least a little functional today.

Today the boys have no school, but they are most likely going with Ken to at least one class this morning. Ken also is going to help Bobby through a couple of paragraphs of his report. I am planning on working on getting the house back in order. It isn’t bad, but with 4 days of neglect it could use a little sprucing. Plus, it will make me feel good, which is reason enough.

Now I will spend some time making this work day go quickly.