Chins Up, Shoulders Down.

The body language of a 9yo who has just scored an own goal, below. Although it's probably more chin up, shoulders forward and hands clutched to middle. This is taken minutes afterwards where he was still fighting back the devastated tears, knowing he had to pick himself up and play on.  Poor little sausage.



And this is him at half time being consoled by another Dad.  What really, really impressed me was Cherub's fortitude in keeping himself together, playing on while wiping away tears and going on to  set up a team-mate for a scoring opportunity.  Brave boy.



The heartbreak too, is that he - being a defender - has never scored a goal in a match before. And his first one ever was a mishit header to the wrong goalmouth.  He was trying to clear it and instead he knocked it in. Ah well.  His team lost 5-3, the final game for the season. Climber's last match for the season was a draw against the top team, and Climber was put in goal for the second half, having not played goalie for the whole season. He did a solid job, despite feeling reluctant about being played there. I was proud of him too.



In other news, I came down with the gastro bug afflicting the household on Thursday evening. Bam! Talk about violent. Friday I was confined to bed trying to gather my strength for Saturday-Morning-Kidtap, 5 Classes! I was still pretty weak Saturday so I asked Climber to be my assistant tap teacher with the 3 junior classes.  He led the warm-ups for me and was a star.  A nervous star, but he did so well, and the little kids loved it. A big kid teaching them!



There was an election on the weekend as well. I was feeling pretty disillusioned with the degree of lowest-common-denominator politics and reporting so I cast my vote and then pretended the whole thing wasn't happening. As a psychologist once said to me Denial is a much-maligned coping mechanism.

And September started like this...

We had pancakes for breakfast in honour of Fathers Day, and later went out to visit the Fixit parents. Pa Fixit has just had a kidney stone of 1.8cm diameter blasted by laser, and Ma Fixit is in hospital for 6-8 weeks or so following a nasty fall last week which resulted in 2 greenstick fractures in her upper left arm, a break in her left hip and a shattered left knee. Oy, poor thing. Plus she hit her chin on the marble bench as she fell so she had a pretty impressive bruise on her jaw to boot. She's looking much better this week which is good.

 

Climber went off with his High School Novice Band on Monday to compete in the Royal South Street Competition in Ballarat.  We were all delighted to hear that their band came second, a great result for their first ever comp.  Climber says they sped up during their first song and thinks this might have cost them first place, because they were only 2 points behind the winning team.  He seems to have enjoyed the experience very much, and when I got to hear about it later he was excited and animated telling me about it all.

There was some confusion about his pick-up from school once the bus got back.  Being Monday he was supposed to - as usual - bring himself to the Tap Hall where I was setting up for an afternoon and evening of teaching. Stupidly, I did not explicitly say this to him before he left for Ballarat. But I had made sure he had charged his phone the night before and that he had it with him when he left, and I sent him a couple of texts to remind him.  When he hadn't turned up by 4pm, I rang: Climber to see where he was (no answer), the school to check if the bus was back on time (it was), Fixit to see if he'd arrived home (he hadn't) and another friend to see if he'd gone home with them (he hadn't). At that stage, Fixit who was in bed at the beginning of a 24 hour gastro attack, hauled himself into the car to look for Climber and found him walking home, not too far away.  Apparently, my little dreamer had sat waiting at school for quite a while, thinking he'd be collected by us, and then caught the tram.  When we discussed it later, I asked why he hadn't rung me when he was waiting to be collected. He said my phone ran out of charge. I said but we made sure your phone was on charge last night so this sort of thing didn't happen. He said well I may have forgotten to check the power point was turned on... Ah well. He got himself home all right in the end and I didn't want to make a fuss because the main thing was he'd had a great experience participating in the band comp.

When I finished work on Monday night, Fixit was out for the count with gastro and Climber had done a great job reheating and serving up the dinner I'd cooked, although the vegetables were inexplicably still sitting on the bench uncooked and uneaten! The kids had put themselves to bed pretty well.

Tuesday was Pyjama Day at Cherub's school.  And I had a painful pinging nerve behind my right ear, caused, I assume, either by prolonged clenching of my jaw muscles (from hearing Fixit's terrible coughs) or by sleeping on a mattress in the lounge so as not to catch Fixit's gastro.  The chiropractor and some panadol put me to rights eventually, although my tap students mentioned that I was unusually cranky with them. Call that a shuffle?



By Tuesday night Fixit was well enough to eat again, and to take the boys to soccer training while I taught.  But there was something in the way Climber looked during dinner that made me think He's Next.  Sure enough at 3am Wednesday morning we were awoken by the sound of Climber throwing up in the bathroom.  And after dealing with him and getting him back to bed we'd barely fallen asleep when we were rudely awoken by the sound of poor Cherub vomiting in our doorway, onto our floor; he was not quite as quick as Climber to realise just what exactly was going on his stomach.  So we put towels down, and spend the rest of the night getting 30 minutes rest before one or the other would be up vomiting again.

I suppose the good thing about Fixit being unemployed is that he was around to help deal with all this.  I would have been a basket case if that had happened while he was doing night shift.

In happier news I bought a lovely new skirt made by fellow blogger Melody. So that's good..