Girls Day Out and Soccer Talk

It feels like a summer day. Really it's felt like a whole week of summer. The girls are home, the weather is wonderful and I have to keep reminding myself that the routine goes back to the daily grind on Monday. It's hard to believe they still have almost 2 months of school left. Allison only has a month before preschool graduation. I think it will be nice to have a few weeks just me and Allie before her sisters finish up.

We went to the Outlet Mall today. It was kind of a girls day out. The outlets have stores for everyone so we had lunch and made the rounds. We found some good deals. On the way home we stopped at BK to get milkshakes. YUM! Now Katie and Becky are upstairs playing - TOGETHER - and Allison is playing cars on the back deck with her friend. I think I'm going to order pizza and find a movie on pay per view to watch before bedtime.

Shop Talk: Assignment 8 is on its way to my instructor. It's always a relief to get an assignment done - on time! As I said before, the market research is so tedious and really slowed me down this time. I had to find three suitable magazines for each of my article outlines and synopsis. My story had a religious slant so I needed to find markets that look for that. There are plenty of them out there but sometimes the age group or word count doesn't match up with my story. I have a How To/History/Informational piece and I'm sure you can tell just by the range in categories that I had my challenges finding a fit for that - although it was the easiest one to find magazines for. And then there's my baseball article. It's a sports/history piece. But again word count and age limits were a tough thing to match with the article. In the end I did find three markets for each and I feel good about the prospects. My neighbor actually subscribes to one of the magazines I chose for my baseball article and she's going to let me look at a couple of issues. That will be helpful! Now I need to prepare something to submit to my critique group by Wednesday - YIKES!

Soccer season is upon us once again. I'm coaching Allison's team of PreK - K kids. There's 10 of them this time. And from what I gather, most of them are PreK (as young as 3!!!) and haven't played before. Do I have my work cut out for me or what?? I'm nervous about the whole thing. I don't have an adult assistant this time. Katie will help with practices and Becky will be there too for crowd control stuff but the pressure is all on me to provide a fun, productive, soccer experience for these kiddos. Parents are tough - I know, I've spent many, many hours on the sidelines as a spectator. Whether they admit it or not, they'll show up with some preconceived perception of what our soccer practices and games should be like. And forget about games. Then they'll be counting the minutes their child played and how the coach didn't let them play in goal, yadda, yadda, yadda. We're going to be playing against some kids who've turned six already and have been playing for a few seasons. They are going to KICK OUR TINY LITTLE BUTTS!! Hopefully the whole thing will be fun and positive for my team - that really is my only real objective. Scoring goals and winning games would be the icing on the soccer ball shaped cake!!