Tournaments = Vacation

When we have 4 tournaments over the course of one summer, two of which require hotel stays for all 4 of us, and they eat up our time off from work...that kind of leads to them replacing what might have been a normal summer vacation. That doesn't mean we don't have fun!

I know I failed to document these occurrences this summer. They were sandwiched around family visits from out of towners, and one day I said to myself, "WHERE DID AUGUST GO???". It was just gone. I went to bed and it was July 31st and when I woke up, the kids headed out the door for school.

Here is a little peak into one of those tournaments. It was the least stressful for me because we only had 5 games (all for Maria) where the previous 3 tournaments had anywhere from 6-8 games each between both girls. Five seemed like a walk in the park!

Here is my girl running like the wind blows. I love it when she does that.





Here she just outsmarted someone and ended up taking the ball down to the corner where the other girl kicked it out. Maria loves to earn her team some corner kicks.

This may have been between games. Maria might be holding a giant machine gun and be shooting at the arcade game.

She is so sweet.

We brought some serious fire to the tournament with us:

I saw some very interesting things at this tournament. One of which was this train, carrying a plane.

If you look very closely, just to the left of the plane, there is a guy just standing on the train. I guess he is guarding the plane? Like someone is going to jump up on the train and steal the plane? Or maybe HE just jumped up there and he is going to steal it? Shoot. I should have called someone about that.

It looks kind of fun.

Now, the Sounders (whom I refer to as "my boys") like to have my presence at practice. I don't ask them why, I just do it.

You may think I am randomly bringing this up. I left Maria warming up on one field, and just walked over to this one and here is what I saw:

In this shot, Mike, Fucito, who had new stitches under his eye, is retelling the story of how he got them. He was elbowed in the face. The outrageous part is that the foul wasn't called. He was bleeding all over the place and NOTHIN'. You can bet we spent some time gesturing at the ref over that one.

This is Patrick Ianni doing a wicked slide tackle against Erik Friberg.

I love it when they do that.

I also love it when certain 11 year olds turn all pro NFL player on me and put black under their eyes. It makes them look intimidating, doesn't it?

This is actually (I swear it!) during one of Maria's games. Morrie is on the phone. My brother in law is on the phone, and Morrie's brother is on the phone. If I remember correctly, Loren was buying high, Ryan was selling low and Morrie was fixing an overheated server room.

Or Ryan was making fun of the brothers.

Yup, I am pretty sure that is what really happened.