Well, I am not a professional soccer player. I know this because I have never played soccer before. Let me start at the beginning. After battling some disgusting stomach bug, I finally felt decent enough to drag my carcass out of bed with Makayla this morning at 7:30 and lay on the couch while she watched her favorite show in the entire world, Glee. Glee is a show about people who are just like Makayla: Musical, dancing, dramatic, passionate, expressive, with a slight smart mouth. We’re only on episode three so far so I’m not sure if these people are the same in the current episodes. I think they’re weirder than those strange hippy parents that lick trees and breastfeed their children into Jr. High but that’s just me. Makayla loves that goofy show. Anyway, after I pumped myself up to do actual mom stuff, Makayla and I went outside to decorate the driveway with chalk. I crafted the world’s coolest hopscotch game and marveled at what a genius Makayla was while she mastered it. I didn’t admit to her that I personally had no idea how to actually play the game of hopscotch, what with the stone and all, until I saw her do it. While she played hopscotch and played word games, she announced what she called “the best idea in the whole fabulous earth.”
“Let’s go have a picnic, Mommy. And then we can play soccer.”
“Sounds good,” I agreed. She told me she would first draw a giant Spongebob and after she was done, she asked me to show her how to nail two pieces of wood together. I showed her how to do that and she said she could only do it if I held the wood still for her. I held it still for her, totally prepared for her to whack my fingers, and taught her what to do with my very limited knowledge on carpentry. She decided we would later make a bug house and keep grasshoppers in it, which brought back a childhood memory of mine where my cat, Spooky and I would go in the back yard and he would pounce on grasshoppers and I would put them in a bucket before he ate them. I called this hunting and regarded my cat the same way a duck hunter would his favorite bird dog. I remembered I could keep these grasshoppers alive forever in the grasshopper habitat (old bucket with a screen over the top and tons of foliage) and I’d name them and pretend I was God and they were my children. I was a weird kid. I’m obviously a weird adult too because I felt a chill of excitement imagining catching grasshoppers with Makayla. I wondered how she would handle actually having to pick up a grasshopper. I wondered if perhaps a caterpillar farm would be a better idea and made a mental note to look into buying one online so that she could watch them morph into butterflies. When she was three, we found a caterpillar and she insisted on us keeping it so it could “turn into a chrysalis” (she knew the word; we read a lot) and a few days later, she peered into the bug zoo I had spent fifty dollars on and whispered, “Oh my gosh Mommy. There’s Fuzzy in his chrysalis.”
In reality, Fuzzy had passed away, despite all of the goodies of green stuff we had given him and was all curled up and hard like most dead bugs are. I told her we should put him outside so he could hatch so that when he became a butterfly, the ceiling fan wouldn’t chop him up. She was pleased with this idea. We did actually find a real chrysalis one time, one that I thought a butterfly had already hatched out of. Because I want Makayla to be a scientist, I told her we should cut it open and see what the inside was like and was horrified to see goop coming out of it because the dumb bug hadn’t completed its metamorphosis. Woops. I felt like I had done something unholy to have chopped a caterpillar in half when it was in the process of morphing into a majestic butterfly. I remember looking at Makayla, horrified, wondering if her three year old brain had registered what had happened. She had one corner of her lip curled up, like Elvis, and said, “That’s gross. That’s why he had to get out of there. Because it’s gross in there.” Relief.
Anyway, so after we agreed that a picnic at the park complete with soccer was a great idea and after we were done drawing and pounding nails into wood, we got started making lunch. We’re out of bread so I made some mac and cheese, packed strawberries, sodas, and off we were. Once we were at the park and I was juggling all the necessities Makayla insisted we needed (soccer bag, umbrella, hoola hoop, harmonica, bubbles, and blanket) as well as our lunch, Makayla took off towards the playground and I had to holler at her to come back and help me. We found a spot under the tree and she opened her umbrella, sat under it, and got to work munching down.
“Why do you have your umbrella open?” I asked her, “it’s not raining.”
“I don’t like the hot,” she said as she forked a spoonful on my macaroni even though she had the same thing in her little bowel. I snapped a picture and after we were done eating, she decided we should play soccer. We went and put our lunch stuff back in the car and she changed into her new light up sneakers and set up all of her soccer drill cone things and got to work. I marveled at her talent. Matt bought her all of her soccer stuff yesterday and he has already taught her pretty well.
“Now you do it!” she yelled at me.
I was a little embarrassed because I have never played soccer and have no idea what to do. I went to pick the ball up so I could place it where I wanted and she yelled, “Stop!” while holding her little hand up to me. I dropped the ball and was confused.
“You can’t pick it up,” Makayla said, “you have to kick it.”
“I’m just going to put it where I want it,” I said, “so I can get ready.”
“That’s cheating. You have to kick it where you want it.”
Oh. Ok.
So I started kicking it and she was outraged.
“With the inside of your feet, Mom,” she said, stealing the ball from me and demonstrating, “and if you want to stop the ball, you stop it with your foot like this.”
She stomped the top of the ball the way she stomps bugs. She kicked it to me and told me to stop the ball. I did and she cheered for me.
“You kick it with the inside of your feet, at the bottom of the ball. Now you try.”
She got fed up with me pretty quickly.
“That’s now how Matt does it,” she said, “you’re doing it wrong.”
I kicked the ball as hard as I could across the playground with an, “oops,” and told her to go fetch it. While she was running after it, I googled “how to play soccer,” so I could get some hints. It took her a while to kick it back over to me so I had time to browse an eHow section.
“You were not supposed to do that,” she said, eyebrows furrowed.
“I don’t really know how to play this game,” I told her, “How about Matt can help you with soccer and I will help you with softball and volleyball and swimming.”
“Matt will help me with swimming,” she said. I was tempted to argue that I was a good swimmer, probably way better than Matt anyway but decided not to be petty. I observed her some more kicking the ball around, super humiliated that I didn’t know how to participate. She eventually got bored and decided she was ready to go play on the playground. This particular playground does not have monkey bars, only these weird circle things that swing around so a child can go in circles while reaching for the next circle thing. I remembered I loved the monkey bars in school and at home, I’d take all the swings off our swing set and pull myself along the entire top of it, certain I was the strongest girl in the world. Makayla played on the circular monkey bar things for a while before she decided she was bored. We went home and she plopped herself in front of the Wii to master some block game Matt taught her this morning. I decided to let her rest so that she’d have enough energy for later to tire herself out before bed. Saturdays with Makayla are too fun.
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