Archery

The rain finally ended sometime late yesterday. It did cause us to have a fairly restful weekend, which I'll never complain about. Actually, I'm hoping to use Kearsyn as an excuse to get out of all the activities for next weekend. Next Saturday is supposed to be what yesterday was scheduled to be, except no softball tournament (that's been moved to Oct 21-22). We just took the soccer schedule and moved it all to next Saturday, including the chaotic picture schedule. If you ever want to see a true racket (in the scandalous sense of the word), have your kids join a sports league. Then sit back and watch the money being spent on those picture packages. People who will bi**h and complain about registration fees will willingly shell out big bucks for pictures of their kids in uniform; pictured on fake trading cards, fake cereal boxes, fake magazine covers, etc. It's like they care more about this image of their kid playing the sport, than their kid actually getting any benefit from playing the sport. I admit I have gotten sucked into this in the past (although I've never spent more than $25 per kid for sports pictures), but then it dawned on me how silly this all was. I have boxes full of these old pictures. The ones I actually keep out are the ones I've taken myself. Nobody is ever going to care what any of my kids looked like in their soccer uniform, pictured on a fake trading card. I'm not buying pictures this year. I've resolved to only pay for pictures when we have our family portrait done in the Fall. Our volunteer fire department hosts a professional photographer to take portrait photos as a fund raiser. It's actually incredibly cheap compared to those studios (plus: no sitting fee, which would bankrupt a family our size), and some of the money goes to our volunteers.

I'm glad the sun returned today. Our Knights of Columbus council holds several activities for kids of our parish and today was week #2 for archery. We had a soccer shootout a few weeks ago. The winner of that, in each age group, gets an award and a chance to compete on a regional level. Archery is something we do for just our parish, and the kids get to shoot arrows at targets for three consecutive weeks (as the weather allows). The guy that runs it (he's pictured with everyone except Connor) is a real archery lover. He supplies all the bows, arrows, and targets for us to do this. And for the kids that get the best scores, he converts old trophies that he's won over the years into awards for the kids. He just changes the plaque to read the kids' names. Connor actually won a trophy the first time we did this a couple of years ago. Here's pictures of all the kids taking their best shots today.

Alex if off at a paintball birthday party. That's something new from when I was a kid! Although we have paintball guns, we don't use them much, so Alex was very excited to get a chance to go shoot his. I've been promising the kids we'd go to the paintball park all Summer, be we just haven't gotten around to it. Maybe we'll go now that school is in session, and we can have the park to ourselves.

Finally, no baby news. I assume Vicki has updated her blog. I haven't checked today because of football, which I'm missing right now, so I'm going to end this and get back in front of the TV. I only have a couple hours before I'm supposed to go play indoor soccer with some friends of mine.