Emma’s hockey team won their game last night, so they have next week off and will then play in the Grand Final the week after! Emma’s really happy. I’m happy that she’s so happy – honestly, hockey has been so good for her this year. Her individual and teamwork skills have improved immensely. Their coach works them hard, and it’s been really good to see Emma rising to the challenge. She’s so much more determined as a player than she used to be and I think she really feels herself a part of the team, which is wonderful. She has really enjoyed it, and I definitely think it’s been worth all the hours in the car and freezing my ass off while she trains!
Sometimes she’s still such a child though. She was messing around with her dinner tonight and Troy told her not to play with her food. In response she said with great dignity, “I’m not playing with it, I’m eating it artistically.”
We all went to watch her last night. It was pretty late and cold for the boys, just hanging around watching, but Jericho and Soren didn’t really mind. Nicholai did, but Nicholai dislikes everything that that doesn’t directly benefit him and really, there’s no making him happy no matter what you do. But I think it does him good to actually have to be part of the family and come to family events, no matter how boring he thinks they are, or how much it embarrasses him to be publically associated with us.
We took a drive down to Frankston today and went for a walk along the beach and the pier, so it has been quite a bit of a family togetherness. I kind of love Frankston. It’s kind of grungy and full of ferals, but it’s where Troy and I lived together before we had kids and it always makes me happy to think about that. The wind off the ocean was really cold today, but walking warms you up and the kids had fun picking through things that had been washed up on the sand (most notably a dead puffer fish – they threw it back and claimed it as a gift for Poseidon, the god of the sea, and then went into hysterics when Poseidon clearly rejected their offering and it washed back up again). The foreshore was crowded with pokemon, pokestops and people wandering around playing, as well as a group of teenagers doing parkour, so we kind of hung around there for a while, and then walked along the pier. We ate lunch on the way home, did a quick grocery shop, and then came home for the children to spend their poker chips on playing. I guess nothing really spectacular happened, but I really enjoyed the day – I like hanging out with Troy and the kids.
Feeling the Sun From Both Sides 