SOD

I have the SOD – Seasonal Overcommitted Disorder. Does this happen to you? In spite of your best intentions NOT to over-schedule your children, carefully keeping them to one extracurricular activity at a time, you find yourself with multiple activities all occurring at once.

This seems to happen to us on a seasonal basis. Spring soccer, ballet and scouts all sort of collide into a mass of over-committments. Saturday, was a blur. We had two soccer games, scheduled 45 minutes apart and located 40 minutes away from each other. (Did you catch that – 40 minutes away. Both games were in the same city, neither were at the farthest edge of the city and we have a 65 MPH speed limit on the freeway. Urban sprawl at its finest.)

Phil was nominated for our parish council and they chose Saturday morning for their day of discernment. I guess it was to sort out the unwashed masses of the nominees. What it really meant was that I was the lone driver for the day.

Poor Boo, he got dropped off at his final soccer game of the season, given a key to the house and strict instructions to only accept a ride home from a parent of one of his teammate, but if no one offers, to sit and wait for me.

Meanwhile, the rest of us traveled to Bip’s soccer game. His team finally won a game, 7 to 4, which is more goals than they’d scored during the entire season combined. Then we had a little party on the field with trophies and cupcakes and pictures. This was to celebrate the end of the season, not the complete routing of the other team of 5 year olds.

Back to the other side of town to pick up Boo. The weather had gotten colder and when we finally picked him up an hour after his game had ended, he was wearing his hat, sweats, sweatshirt and gloves. No one had offered him a ride home, of course. Our days of living in Military Mayberry are over.

After lunch Boo went off to some scout merit badge workshop. Somehow scouts manages to morph itself from a single, weekly meeting into almost monthly camping trips and other various and sundry weekend activities. We have a tough time getting him a ride to some of these things, too. But that is a vent for another time.

Then I took Pumpkin Girl and Bip to see “Cinderella.” This was Pumpkin’s ballet school’s pre-professional division’s year-end performance. I was originally just going to take Pumpkin Girl, but one day Bip saw her student teacher – also called Pumpkin Girl – and thought she was pretty. When he found out that she was dancing the lead as Cinderella, he decided to come along.

By the way, the student teacher has the same real life name as Pumpkin Girl, not the same nickname. But you figured that out, right?

Whew, I am tired just typing that all out. But now soccer season is over, as is religious education – which we don’t count as an extracurricular – and Pumpkin already had her own ballet recital, so things can start to settle down. Right?

Right?

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