Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Soccer Notes

A couple of additional soccer notes:
1) Thursday practice this week has been moved to Saturday at 4:30pm, so we've got soccer on Saturday and Sunday this coming weekend.
2) Sunday Soccer on Easter weekend has been moved to Easter Monday at 5:00pm.

If you'd like a subscription to our iCal calendar, leave a comment or shoot me an email and I can get you setup.

Monday, March 26, 2007

Sleepy SoccerDad Sunday Update

Aidan had his third Soccer Sunday yesterday. He, Bryce, and I and Aunt Patty braved the 87 degree early springtime heat to get out on the pitch! Aidan got his jersey and they played a scrimmage with some kids from St. Rose down in Murfreesboro.

A friend of ours refers to soccer at this age as "Buffalo Ball" and it really is an apt description. Kids chasing the ball, kicking it in any direction, then chasing again.

Aidan was, like a lot of the other kids, a little timid about getting into the thick of it and really kicking at the ball.. ...and he wasn't always sure where he was supposed to be-- especially when the coach asked him to play back on defense-- he really had no idea when to chase after the ball then!

On the drive over to the field, he said "If I fall down, I'm going to retire."
The memory of the spill he took during his first Cross Country meet is still with him.

He did fall down a time or two, but he didn't retire.. he go back up and kept running.
I'm not sure if he loves soccer yet or not, but he's enjoying giving the ball a good kick every now and then...



Sunday, March 25, 2007

Painting Party!

Our neighbor friend, Blaine, celebrated his third birthday yesterday with a huge painting party in his back yard!

Bryce gets started

Aidan (and Bryce in the background) making masterpieces

Aidan decided to paint a rainbow

The most critical element of this masterful party plan: the clean-up pool!

the five day forecast

Let's fly a kite!

Earlier this week, on a good and windy day, we took Aidan and Bryce to a nearby park to do some kite-flying... and, amazingly, no one got tangled in the strings!



Monday, March 19, 2007

SoccerDad Sunday update

Aidan had his second soccer practice yesterday. The coach taught them about dribbling the ball and how to stop the ball with your foot.
Then they split up into teams and played a little scrimmage.
I'm not convinced that Aidan really gets the team concept of the game, but he's having a lot of fun learning, all the same.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

SoccerDad Sunday

Bryce is ready to go see some soccer today!

Don't forget the socks...

Bryce's socks this morning..

The Wild Dog of Kilkenny

Well, not quite a wild dog.. but Elly May did get into the act..

Saturday, March 17, 2007

A pair of Gartloney Rats...


Well the Gartloney Rats would play away
They'd play for the pints and not for the pay
And the pints they'd go down in the usual way
And they'd never get drunk but stay sober
--The Pogues

Now Serving: Soda Bread...

We made a couple of Soda Breads last night and I think they came out pretty well..

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Penguins galore!

If you've not heard of Club Penguin, you've clearly not spent much time around our boys lately.
Since last year when our cousins the great northern territory of Minnesota came for a visit and introduced us to this online novelty, Clubpenguin.com has been practically all Aidan can talk about...
... and so of course, never to be outdone, Bryce is an intense fan now, himself, as well.

Wired Magazine has an article about it, this month-- so at least we know it's not only a phenomenon in our house.

But just to give you an even more excruciating sense of how pervasive this thing is-- the other day at Aidan's soccer practice, after they grouped the kids up into little teams, the woman heading Aidan's team was soliciting ideas for what their team name should be and I saw her bend down so she could hear Aidan say something....

... next thing you know, the team name is "The Penguins."

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Soccer Sunday

Sleepydad became SoccerDad for the first time earlier today (Happy Daylight Savings Time, by the way!) as we took Aidan to his first soccer practice. He's playing in a kind of 8 week spring soccer camp hosted at a nearby high school... and to say that he jumped straight into it with both feet would be a terrible understatement!

A number of players from the high school boys and girls teams are participating in the league, helping to coach and mentor the little kids and it looks like Aidan is going to have a great time!
They'll have practice on Thursday evenings and more practice and loose scrimmages like today for an hour on Sunday afternoons.

So it's SoccerDad Sundays from now through the month of April. Stay tuned.

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Photobooth

Calling in from Gramma and Grampa's house this morning.. and Aidan has been playing with Grampa's iSight and Photobooth..



Thursday, March 08, 2007

So what is this RSS Subscription thing anyway?

So you may have been asking yourself, over the last few weeks-- "What is this orange thingey they put up here with the 'Subscribe to Aidan's Daily Note'?

It's a link to our RSS feed.

Hoping not to bore you with too much jargon, let me just tell you RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and what it allows you to do is-- with an RSS reader (browsers like Safari and Firefox have RSS readers built into them now), also known as a 'news aggregator'-- you can receive a little feed that shows you whenever new things have been added to the page.

So instead of having to come to this page everytime you want to see if I've added something new, you can just check the feed.

I know, I know.. that doesn't sound so cool.. unless you consider all the websites you visit in a day-- many of which now publish RSS feeds along with them. So now.. instead of having to view each of those sites individually, you can see the headlines for ALL fo them simultaneously on a single screen.

Google for instance, has incorporated this into both their "Personalized Home Page" and their newer "Google Reader". "My Yahoo" does the same thing.
Here's a screenshot of the personalized Google page I use to keep up with all the Notre Dame football news.

Okay.. so that's that.. just in case you were wondering..

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Farmer Bryce

In the continuing series of Bryce's costume parade-- today he wanted to go to school dressed as a farmer..

Bed Head

Tuesday, 7:08am

Buzz and Lightning

The boys debuted their new PJs last week...

Bryce was pretending that his 'Buzz Lightyear' wings would pop out.. then said to me "I'm going to fly around now."