Eric's First Soccer Game

Today was Eric's first soccer game--ever! He was pretty excited, as you can see, still able to smile even after his Mama kept asking him to stand in different places so she could get a good picture of him in his uniform. His Uncle John would be happy to see that Eric's uniform is mainly maroon in color, the color of Uncle John's alma mater. For some reason, when I was changing him into his uniform, he took off his other clothes and then asked if he could leave his underwear on. Yes, silly boy.

Before talking about the game, I'm going to talk about our morning. I took Anthony to school at 6:30 for his cross country meet this morning. I had been torn whether or not to go to Anthony's meet or to go to Eric's game. Anthony, the sweet boy that he is, told me that he had lots of cross country meets, there was only one "first game", so of course I went to Eric's game.

I brought home Benny's Tacos for Alex and Starbucks for Patrick. When I got home I took the little ones to Starbucks--Eric's choice. We came home from breakfast and got him dressed for soccer. His uniform was a bit big. In fact, all the uniforms were big for all the kids.

The game started at 9am. We had an inexperienced referee. Instead of 10 minute quarters, which is the standard at this age, the first quarter ended up being about 20 minutes. The kids who were playing that first quarter were exhausted and asking for water. There were also a few tears from different children during the game, from colliding with each other, or from getting hit with the ball.

Eric did okay during the game. He was totally not paying attention, so he didn't get to play in the first quarter. He did a lot of standing around staring off into space. He got distracted during the opening prayer and started picking up something off the grass. In this picture, he is playing with his huge shorts while he is playing on defense with another boy. He started crying at one point because he had bonked heads with one of his teammates. Natalie was there to help calm him down.

He did play like he was supposed to for part of the game. He ran after the ball and moved it down the field. There were two players on his team that were particularly aggressive, both were girls. One of them basically mowed him down at one point, in order to get to the ball. Patrick had to remind them that they were all on the same team. Eric himself shoved a few kids because they were shoving him.

Eric also got his first taste of the post-game snacks. Each kid got two tokens to spend at the concession stand on whatever they wanted. Eric chose a ring pop and a bag of Doritos. Natalie and Patrick shared some of their snow cones with him too. He dropped his ring pop on the ground, so he didn't really get any of that--not a big disappointment for me and he didn't seem that disappointed either. He really enjoyed that bag of Doritos.

Eric has a total of 12 games scheduled, most on Saturday and a few on Sunday. I hope he still enjoys playing throughout the season.