Toby's First Soccer Game

I feel I must give you an update on Toby’s first soccer game. 

With all of the "Harold lessons" I could deliver, after weeks of counting down the sleeps, Saturday eventually came and my parental lessons in sportsmanship were put to a test.

The first step of ANYTHING when it comes to Toby is getting over his shyness- factor.  When it comes to any new situation (no matter HOW exciting or prepared he is for it) there is always the very REAL possibility that he will revert to
“shy Toby”, hide behind my legs and absolutely refuse to participate. 

Luckily, the prospect of choosing his very own NUMBERED purple soccer shirt quickly negated this possibility.

The next potential hurdle is a possibility with ANY four year old ANYWHERE in the world.  Sometimes, no matter HOW excited they are, they may just change their mind, start hating (insert said activity), cross their arms, sit down in the middle of wherever they are, and refuse to have anything more to do with whatever fun activity they had been counting down the minutes to engage in.

This, too, we averted by the arrival of his friends Meredith and Sam who ALSO got to choose purple shirts with REAL numbers on them.

The practice went smoothly with every 4 year old taking their turn kicking, shooting, running and crying in alternating succession.  Finally it was time to put Toby’s lifetime of practice to the test; it was time for his very first (ten minute long) soccer game.

This is where motherhood once again stepped in to remind me that I am no longer in control of who I formerly was. 

I got nervous.

It was 4 on 4.  Ten minutes.  No referees and no scorekeepers.  Why on EARTH was my heart racing at a million miles a minute?

The game itself was somewhat like herding cats that had been given copious amounts of female hormones and then shown the final scene of Love Actually while drinking red wine.  Tears, temper tantrum and erratic movements that made absolutely no sense to anyone who was watching ensued while the parents helplessly watched from the sidelines.

Somewhere, from the depths of my mommy-ness, came a fierce feeling I have hardly ever felt before.   It took every ounce of m strength to contain myself from not jumping up and down and screaming, “GO GET THAT BALL, TOBY, AND SHOOT!!!!”

Finally, after mustering up his courage, Toby got the ball and was off on a breakaway.   As I screamed with excitement from the sidelines he made it all the way down the field.  As he approached the net my heart was in my throat HOPING the he would make the shot and be able to live out his great dream of SCORING a GOAL in a REAL soccer game.

As he lifted up his foot to shoot he suddenly stopped (WHAT WAS HE DOING?!?!?), turned around (TOBY, THAT’S THE WRONG DIRECTION!!!!) and passed to his teammate.  (WTF?!?!?!)

(What a clever child-- it turned out to be the coach’s daughter to boot.)

I am happy to report (for my own sanity) that he DID get a few goals during the rest of the game, but his proudest moment came afterwards, when his coach praised him for being the “first four year old EVER to actually PASS the ball.”

So it seems Toby may have actually learned a lesson from our nightly reading of “Harold B Wigglebottom Learns about Sportsmanship”.  I wonder if they make a version for soccer moms, too?

(This is him enjoying a well deserved plate of strawberry waffles after the game...you can tell he worked up an appetite!!!)

Curbing the Competitive Nature in Him

The more I get to know and love my son, the more I like to think he is similar to me in many ways.  But there is one thing about Toby that is a NOT like me; Toby is the most COMPETITIVE person I have ever met. He always has to be the first one dressed, bathed, up the stairs, down he stairs, in the car - -you name it!  He has to be first. If we take two cars somewhere he asks who is going to drive away first and demands to be in that car.   When we watch sports he always cheers for the team that is going to win.  At the dinner table his apples fight with his peas over who is going to get eaten first.  It is NEVER ENDING and INCREDIBLY monotonous to someone who doesn’t give a hoot about sports or rankings.

  Rob and I have seen this innate sense of competition in him, but didn’t realize just how bad it was until Rob innocently won a game of memory with him a few weeks back.  The temper tantrum that ensued was earth shattering.  His jaw froze with a wail so intense it was initially silent.  As his lips turned purple and his eyes began to bulge his tight little fists grabbed the table in a death grip. I wasn’t sure EXACTLY what sound was going to finally come out of him and we just all sat there in complete wonder as we awaited the verdict.  Even Mia, too, was awestruck by it.  And then the silence broke – game pieces were scattered across the floor, chairs were overturned, tears flooded the floor and the walls shook with the sound of his heartbroken wail.

I burst out laughing. 

It was, quite honestly, the most ridiculous thing I’d ever witnessed

After Rob felt it was safe to let me out of my impromptu time-out, Toby had settled into a low grade sobbing with the occasional stuttering, “I…. LOST (sniff sniff)…at…. Memory…and…Daddy (sniff sniff)…. BEAT ME!!!!!! WAAAAAHHHHH”

I think you get the gist.

Ever since then we have tried our hardest to curtail this innate need to win with measured lessons in “coming in second” and daily reminders of fairness and sportsmanship.  Some days, depending on my morning energy level, I even let Mia brush her teeth before him. (!!)  We are making (slow) progress.

But as we approach the start of Toby’s first ever soccer season, we’ve had to kick up our efforts into high gear.

Toby is a sports and (in particular) soccer FANATIC.  He would play soccer 24 hours a day if we let him.  Most of the time he is forced to play with is imaginary friends but those games are just as “intense” as real games and I am constantly being updated on the score, who scored what goal and the distribution of yellow cards.  My great fear is that he is going to bring this intensity with him to his first soccer game this weekend and scare the crap out of every other 4 year old on the field.

AND his coaches.

And so I bought Toby a new book.  It is called “Harold P. Wigglebottom Learns about Sportsmanship.”

It is a story about some sort of animal that is really a human (you know the kind…I think this one is a dog) who loves soccer and is REALLY good at it but is OBSESSED with winning.  (Sound familiar?)  It details a particularly ridiculous tantrum (no, I have not plagiarized the plot of this book in the opening part of my blog) and then talks about a soccer game in which Harold gets kicked out for being unsportsmanlike.  Finally his coach puts him back in and he is given he opportunity to score the winning goal but passes to a friend instead.  The friend doesn’t make the shot and the other team ends up winning but Harold (miraculously) doesn’t care and is, in fact, PROUD of his 2^nd place trophy because he was a GOOD SPORT.  (It is SUCH an unrealistic story and OBVIOUSLY not written by anyone who has ever met a kid who has the innate gene for competition like Toby…but that’s beside the point)

Toby listened very intently to this story.  His mesmerization and intense concentration reminded me of my initial reaction to Einstein’s theory of relativity; it shattered everything I had known was constant about the universe and challenged my brain to think in another dimension.  I suspect this notion of “NOT WINNING” had a similar effect on Toby’s brain.

At the end of the story I gave him a few seconds to digest things and then asked him what he had learned from the story.

“Well…”Toby said very slowly and precisely…”I learned…that…. the final score was THREE to TWO and that the BLUE team won!”

It seems we still have a wee bit of work to do…

Advances in Language Development

The way I remember it, Toby was a very advanced in his speech and language development.  Even though it sounds like I’m bragging, don’t worry, it will soon be mitigated by the self-depricating reality; it was all a maternal mirage of first-born-bias. Toby DOES have a great vocabulary, but lets just say it wasn’t EXACTLY as we had remembered it.

Sometime after Mia was born, Rob and I were looking back on videos of Toby and reminiscing.  We came across one in which I knew the punch line before we had even pressed play.  Although it had been years since I’d taken the video,  I CLEARLY remembered what it was about.  Toby was about 15 months old and he LOVED blue berries.  In fact, he loved them SO MUCH that he would ask for them by name; a skill I thought was nothing short of genius at the time.  This video was taken in his highchair as he awaited his next blue berry.  His quiet shyness merely serves to accentuate the suspense towards his brilliant linguistic triumph that comes at the end of the video.

As we watched the video together I forewarned Rob about the ending so he didn't fall off his chair in astoundement by his near-perfect-and light-years-before-it-was-expected-developmentally pronunciation of the word “BLUE BERRY.”

Here’s the video.  You can see for yourself the fatal crash and burn effect it had on my ego.

After that preamble, I am now going to share with you the first of MANY videos we will likely take detailing the brilliant milestones that Mia will achieve on her own path of language development.  In this video, however, you can CLEARLY see which parent has learned from past experience…

For the record, I still think it sounds more like "Da-da"...

The Anonymous Donor

This weekend I participated in a hike to raise money for our local Hospice organization.  A 7km hike is not the greatest of physical feats but the cause is one that is extremely important to me; we are trying to raise money to build a residential hospice in our area. Right now the closest residential hospice is in Barrie.  It is a gorgeous facility but it is either too far for families to travel or it means patients transferring to a different doctor in Barrie once they make the move.  As a result, out residents are left with only two options – dying at home or dying in hospital.

Today the need for a local hospice was driven home to me even more when one of my very favourite patients, whose family I have grown very close to over the past 5 months, got offered a bed at Hospice Simcoe. Although I know it is the right decision for them, saying goodbye at this stage in the game was hard on all of us.  As I explained it once to Rob, it’s like teaching Grade 8 all year and then missing the last week of school and graduation.   It will be SO nice when we will be able to truly deliver on our promise to walk with people right to the end.

I am happy to report that the hike was a huge success.  Not only did all 4 of the Henry crew participate, but there were no tears, tantrums OR injuries to speak of (all thanks to numerous boxes of raisins and good old fashioned peanut butter sandwiches.)

Today, after being told that our fundraising and perilous hiking escapades managed to raise over $85,000 I set to work at sending out a thank you email to everyone who had sponsored me.  I had a pretty good idea of who to include in the email as I had taken note of each sponsorship notification as it came in, but just to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anyone I went through my emails one last time.

As I was nearing the end of them I found a surprising one that caught me off guard.  How had I not noticed this before?  Some anonymous donor had sponsored me $500!!!! I couldn’t believe it!  I quickly perused the email to see if there were any indications as to who it was  -- there were none.  No name, no address, no email, NOTHING but the impressive sum of $500.

I was sitting in Toyota waiting for my snow tires to be removed as I made this discovery and I sheepishly admit to tearing up in public as I thought about this “secret admirer” that I must have.  I soon realized that it HAD to be a former patient or grateful family; Rob would never sponsor me that much without TELLING me about it and my parents and good friends had all already donated.  The pride of knowing that what I do means THAT much to someone was overwhelming.   I kept glancing around the room to see if my emotional response was going to go by unnoticed.  It wasn’t.  But who cared? It’s not EVERYDAY that you realize what your…

And then it hit me.

I had forgotten that in my excitement about registering for the hike and setting up my webpage I had also sponsored myself.

$500.

Anonymously.

Sigh.  It was a nice thought while it lasted…

The Scariest thing He's Ever Done

We had had lots of forewarning; the weekend had been planned out since before New Years Eve when I wrote my father a birthday card that sealed my fate by simply stating, “For your birthday this year I am going to take you out for dinner.”

At one point I had thought maybe the card would be a passing thought, but I had no such luck. He perused this card as if it contained the secret of life.  My mother tells me he kept it by his side amidst the random pile of newspapers he pretends to read each morning and his assortment of reminders, calendars and post it notes that helps keep his dementia at bay.  About twice an hour, on average, my dad would read his birthday card aloud and shriek with excitement when he read the inscription, reveling in his good luck that he was going to be TAKEN OUT for DINNER.

 WHEN, Lynda, did she think I was going to come down and take him for dinner?  TONIGHT perhaps?  Had I meant TONIGHT?  Did they have plans?   Would he be free to go? I hadn’t the heart to tell him it wasn’t for a few months down the road.  Eventually my mother hid the card…for all of our sanity.

And now here we are, I sheepishly admit, four months later and the dinner date has arrived.  The part of the equation that the card failed to mention was that it was also a present for my mother.  Dad would get a special dinner out with us and mom would be free to enjoy a guilt free evening with her friends knowing her husband was in good hands and enjoying himself.  (Theoretically, at least.)

A great deal of planning went into this single evening.   Mom had to plan (elaborately) a suitable night on the town  (complete with a full 24 hours pre and post event activities).  We had to deliver and prep the waitress about his de-alcohol ized wine, mom and her friends had to find accommodations close, but not too far away and a babysitter had to be procured.  I won’t go into details about the random tidbits of life that flew our way this weekend that nearly capsized our plans, the WORST of which being my own father’s anxiety about my mother ABANDONING him for a night with his daughter. (!!!)

FINALLY, after finding a last minute replacement babysitter (for the unreliable 14 year old who randomly decided on THIS WEEKEND of all weekends, to garner a social life) we were out the door, Carl Jung de-alcoholized wine deceptively in hand, ready to face a night of repetitive questioning as to the whereabouts of my poor mother.

Not long into dinner, just when I thought I had heard every story there was to hear about playing hockey in Cortina and teaching high school English at Northview, the cloud of anxiety lifted off my dad; he and Rob started debating the new rules of hockey and who the greatest sports heros were.  I realized it had been a very long time since I'd last had such a natural and meaningful conversation with him.  It was then that I brought out the “Questions cards”.  It is something my dad has always loved as it gives him free reign to reminisce, reflect and then talk about himself.  Each card contains a simple question, “Who is your greatest hero?” or “What was your greatest fear”.  You never know where it is going to take the conversion, but as long as it doesn’t go back to “WHERES LYNDA” we are good with just about anything.

A few interesting conversations unraveled before we hit the “What is the scariest thing you’ve ever done?” card.  My dad, the man who couldn’t for the life of him tell you what day it is or where on earth his wife had gotten to, didn’t miss a beat. “That’s EASY.” He said, “Going over Niagara Falls.”

I was met with was a split second of shock, speechlessness and unexpected humour all at once and there was only one reasonable response to his statement; I spit my precious mouthful of Shiraz all over the white table cloth.

It seemed ludicrous at first, but he had some robust and consistent details to corroborate his tale.  It was the 1950s.  They went over in a little boat.  He went with his teaching buddies at the time. They wore lifejackets.  Why was I looking at him like he was crazy? LOTS of people do it all the TIME.

Was he full of shit?

Of COURSE he was full of shit.  I think there was only ONE PERSON in the history of the WORLD who has ever travelled over Niagara Falls and lived to tell the tale.  But who am I to squash the most interesting story my dad has ever told me? 

As the night went on we kept coming back to this epic adventure over the falls that took place sometimes in the 1950s.  My dad eventually started chuckling as he told it and shaking his head, ‘You guys are making me think this didn’t happen the way you keep ASKING me about it like it’s RIDICULOUS” he said at one point.

Eventually and rather painlessly, our night out came to an end, with none of us really knowing where the truth began or ended. 

I suspect sometime in his life, my father took cowardly trip on the Maid of the Mist, but after last night he still has me guessing.

What I DO know for sure this: tonight my dad is back home with his pile of papers, pretending to get caught up on the world events that went on while he was on his quick jaunt to Collingwood.  The Stanley Cup playoffs are probably on in the background, which he will feign watching later.   His martyr of a wife is again loyally by his side and he probably has no recollection of the anxiety he had felt in her absence a mere 24 hours earlier.  All is right in his world again.

He may one day find that card I gave him and wonder whether I ever DID take him for dinner.  He’ll probably even call tomorrow night complaining that we never get to see one another, but this time I’ll know a little secret: we did, Dad.  And it’s a night at least ONE of us will never forget.

(My dad - -the great adventurer...and surprisingly good storyteller!)