Basketball, snowflakes, and a teacher

Completely random title, I know. But it’s a blog post with those things in it. I find myself here, at 4:00 in the afternoon, on the day in which chaos begins for Christmas break, finally DONE with everything. I hope. And so, I thought I would try to get a bit caught up on the blogging and the pictures. Here goes…

Sarah’s 2nd to last basketball game was against our neighbor’s school. These neighbors have 3 daughters, in the same grades as our 3 oldest daughters. And their oldest plays basketball, so Sarah and A got to play against each other.

It was a nasty game, honestly. The first quarter started out all right, a little scrappy, and some poor refereeing, but we were ahead 13-0. The second quarter got physical. And the refereeing got worse. And by half time it was 13-13. So the third quarter was even nastier and by the end of the fourth quarter, we had a girl with a broken finger and another who had been tripped and landed on her face on the gym floor and was in tears. Our girls aren’t physical ball players. And those opponent’s were. We managed to scrape out a win, but it wasn’t a fun experience. I think Sarah enjoyed playing with her friend, but she wasn’t sure how to react to the rough play. She said afterward, “I didn’t know whether to be rough back or to just totally back off.” Let me just say, she chose back off. Sarah is not aggressive by nature and to get into that is just not her style.

But, at the beginning of the second quarter, Sarah and A were both on the court and stood next to each other during a foul shot.

Sarah’s last basketball game was much better, even though they lost. She played “C” team and they showed some real progress in that game. They executed their plays and really handled the ball much better than at the beginning of the season. It was a super-fun game because near the end the coach called for a new play that started with Sarah taking the ball down the court, passing it off about halfway down, two more passes, and then back to Sarah in the middle of the key for the shot. Sarah added her own little “fake” to the beginning of the play, which fooled the opponents every time, so it was really fun to watch. It took 3 tries before Sarah made the shot, but when she came out of the game, her coach gave her a high-five and said, “That was brilliant!” It was just a really fun game.

One of our Advent activities is always cutting out and decorating snowflakes.

That paper must be really hard to cut through!

And cutting a proper snowflake takes intense concentration, you know.

But everyone was happy in the end!

Sarah didn’t make a snowflake that night because she had too much homework. Our Advent calendar is getting harder every year as the girls grow older and busier and have more homework. We may have to change how we do things with that…we’ll see what genius idea I come up with next year.

Elise and her teacher, my mom. They’re pretty good buddies.