The Peanut Gallery: September Events

Some recent happenings....

A visit from Nanny and Papa. As always, it was wonderful to see them and to watch them love my girls. We also celebrated GG's 81st birthday with the whole Hansen crew... lots of fun.

Two visits from Ty and Sara in two weeks.

While everyone has always said that Mazie looks like Caleb, Athena seems to have inherited more of the Hansen-side features. Many people have said she looks like me or Ahya, but by far the most common comment is that she looks like her Uncle Tyler. This was actually one of the first things I said when she was born! "She looks nothing like Mazie. She looks like Tyler!" (The former statement probably wasn't accurate... the two girls do look alike in many ways. But the second statement still holds up.)

Mazie's soccer debut... playing on a 4 v 4 team with cousins Olivia and Crosby, and friends Treyden, Noah, Quentin, Caetano, and Samyar. The first week was a bit of a disaster -- Mazie (and most of her teammates, with the exception of our ringer, Caetano) spent much of the game in tears. She was frustrated that she couldn't score a goal and that the other kids were faster than her -- not surprising since most of her teammates are 3 like her, and the "league" they're playing in is for kids under 5, so lots of 4 year olds. The funny thing about this is that we kind of went into this whole thing thinking that as long as we, the parents, didn't make it competitive or talk about winning, the kids wouldn't be competitive either. Wrong. Even if she didn't care about the score of the game, Mazie of course understood that the goal of the game was to get the ball in the net, and was super frustrated when she couldn't even get a turn with the ball, let alone score.... Aunt Sara took some great pictures -- here are a few, and there are more in the album at the bottom of this post.

So between games we did some strategizing, and the result was a MUCH better week 2. Caleb's idea was to add a second ball, so that whenever either coach wanted to they could peel a kid off from the pack and let them dribble down by themselves and score a goal. This turned out to be a great strategy -- giving all the kids an opportunity to score worked wonders for team morale and we went from almost ALL the kids crying in week one to NO TEARS in week 2. Huge improvement. We've also been having practice once a week, and the kids have lots of fun with that -- they all have their own ball and get to just play some games that are somewhat soccer-related. Having grown up watching her daddy coach, Mazie LOVES being a part of the whole routine... loves putting on her uniform, loves being instructed on what to do, loves the team talk at the end of practices and games. (Sometimes she'll make Caleb run a practice for her at home, and always insists that he talk to her at the end. "Great practice, Mazie. I thought we did a really great job with the dribbling drills. Next time let's work a little more on shooting.") I anticipate many "most coachable" awards in her future.

Broncos game with Grandpa, whom Mazie has taken to calling "Grampy," "Grampy Pampy," or, most recently, "Grampy Pampers." The Donkeys actually won a game for us, beating the Bengals 24-22.