A fine weekend
Posted by Mr. Yoder on 19 April, 2010
This is really 2 topics, combined in one post.
My three year old started Iddy Biddy soccer on Saturday. He’s on the gray team. Before I’m condemned as a helicopter parent that’s pushing his kid to be a soccer player, let me defend the program. It strikes the perfect balance between the ‘pushing him until he burns out’ stereotype and the ‘politically correct, everybody gets a trophy’ stereotype. The sessions are an hour long, 40 minutes of skills and drills, then 20 minutes of a ‘game.’ The ‘game’ consists of one color vs. another, and the coaches make certain to point the kids in the right direction (actually a very important step). There’s no score, and there’s no strategy and it is hysterical.
When we first arrived I was stunned to see a 3 year old wearing cleats, shin guards and tape on his ankles. This is clearly a family that falls into the ‘pushing him until he burns out’ stereotype. Was it wrong of me to get a small sense of satisfaction watching the kid cry his eyes out clinging to his dad’s leg because he didn’t want to play? I mean, I feel bad for the kid, don’t get me wrong, but I just want to go to the dad, point at the kid’s Adidas and laugh.
Before the session started, I told my son to take a ball and kick it around. He did this in the most serious fashion possible, weaving in and out of other kids and parents. After getting his shirt (which he showed off like this is the finest garment he’s ever owned) his first drill was dribbling. The kids were to take the ball, dribble from one cone to another (5 m away) and back. The instructor defined dribbling as kicking the ball and running, keeping the ball close to your feet. My boy puts on his serious face, winds up, and kicks the ball the whole way to the other cone. He then runs to the other cone, and boots the ball back again in one shot. Eventually he got the hang of it.
Next was passing. Here his one-touch skills should have been an asset. However, he had dribbling on his mind, so he spent most of the passing time dribbling the ball to his partner. Fortunately he had his serious face on the whole time.
By the time shooting rolled around, he had the hang of it and his face didn’t quite look like he had some bad milk on his cereal. His first shot was good, but then he kept fading left. He’d chase the ball, and then being right footed, circle it entirely before squaring up and driving it left again. The best part was when he did score: his method to retrieve the ball was to crawl in to the little goal, grab the ball, then try to stand up, nearly upending the goal as the kid behind him in line was shooting.
During the game portion of the session, his gray team matched up with the blue. Gray clearly had the upper hand, if only because the blue team was hemorrhaging players. By the end, it was 9-2. Not the score, but players on the field. And my boy only went the wrong way with the ball once.
Saturday evening brought the U.S. premiere of the latest season of Doctor Who on BBC America. Everything’s new: producer, writer, companion, Doctor. I was a little apprehensive. I loved David Tennant as the Doctor. I was dismayed to hear that he was leaving. One of the former producers of the show described him as ‘verbally dexterous’ which nails it exactly. An Irish actor, he says things so fast, and in an English accent, most of it I couldn’t understand. What I could understand was fantastic (my favorite was when he defined a ‘happy number’ then asked ‘…don’t they teach recreational mathematics anymore?’). I was excited for a new companion though. Martha Jones and Rose Tyler were good, Donna Noble not so much (her grand dad was better than she was).
In the preview images, Matt Smith didn’t look nearly so crazy in the eyes as Tennant. I wasn’t sure he could live up to the role. I’m relieved to say it looks like he’ll make it. He’s a good physical actor, and he rattled off some great bursts of dialogue of his own (my favorite, describing a virus he wrote on an iPhone: ‘…just a tiny bit alive’). The new companion Amy Pond is more in the vein of a Martha Jones rather than Donna Noble, so I’m looking forward to that. And as I watched the episode, I realized I had been missing the episodic nature of the show. It can just be an isolated hour of Amy and the Doctor. When Tennant announced his depature, the show went into extreme serial mode. It was great, but I had forgotten how much fun closure at the end of an hour long episode can be. I give it an anticipatory ‘whole’ on the milk scale. My DVR is set.