Football!!

I signed Will up for flag football in August. He's in a league with 3- and 4-yr old's. Much to my DISMAY, he ended up on the Raiders. Yeah, the Raiders. I just call it the "Black Team." Anyway, so flag football at this age only faintly resembles actual football and that's okay. There's no tackling (on purpose, anyway) but the kids often end up in a big pile at the end of every play. Each team gets a chance to have each player snap the ball once and run the ball once. No score is kept but we cheer like crazy when they run it into the end zone.
Will is starting to learn a little bit about the sport. Granted, he spends a fair amount of time sitting on the grass, gazing at the sky while I hiss from the sidelines GetuprightnowifIhavetocomeoverthere... you know, really compassionate, motivational talk. He learned how to block at last week's practice and that has seemed to increase his enthusiasm for the game. He's also perfecting his Game Face, or maybe he's just glaring at his parents on the sidelines because they won't bring him a juice box onto the field during *halftime.*On Saturday, Will scored his first touchdown. This is the only picture I snapped of the action because I was too busy jumping up and down and screaming like an over-competitive lunatic. Will's not the fastest kid on the field and his 30-yd scamper took about 2 1/2 minutes but it sure was pretty. You know how sometimes a defensive lineman will recover a fumble and rumble down the field for 80 yds to score the touchdown, and it takes forever and he needs oxygen when it's all over with? That was a little like Will's touchdown. He was actually running slow enough to swat the hands of the team away as they tried to grab his flag. I was just screaming RUN WILL RUN RUN RUN. He didn't really understand the enormity of scoring a touchdown (and I know how ridiculous I sound by typing that because there really isn't any enormity since they don't keep score and blah blah blah) but it was his first touchdown and I couldn't have been any prouder. After you score a touchdown, you have to spend a good five minutes getting all of your flags back on because they get ripped off long after you've run out of the endzone. Some kids just keep running onto the next field. I've advocated for shock collars or an electric fence because the yelling and whistling from the parents does little to keep them on their own field of play. Maybe a few intimidating-looking herding dogs would do the trick? Hey Reina has some exciting news. File this one under "reasons why she'll hate me when she's older" but she's not wearing diapers in this picture. Yeah!! We did the whole boot camp strategy for potty training and so far, not bad. She's had some accidents but she seems to be figuring it out. With as finicky as she is about her clothes, I thought she'd hate to get her pants wet but ehhh, she's pretty casual about the whole thing. She's more concerned about negotiating how many M&M's she gets following each successful trip to the bathroom. She fans both hands out and says "I want this many!" (10). I want to get her potty trained but I'm not giving her ten M&M's every half hour. So to wrap-up, each week Will seems to learn a little more and gain a little enthusiasm for football. He even set aside his Lego's and curled up next to me on the couch on Sunday while I watched NFL games - the Purple team and the Blue team (Vikings v. Lions). He seems to actually like it and while the uber-competitive side of me wants to see him on the football field in a few years, the mommy side of me is just happy that he wants to watch it with me right now and we don't have to worry about concussions, ACL's and all that scary stuff. I'll take this stage for as long as it lasts.