Memorial Day and more

I seem to be playing catch up in many areas and the blog is no exception.  For Memorial Day I took the kids up to Pine Orchard, CT where they had a lot of fun playing with their cousins.  Despite staying in a 7 bedroom house, my kids decided we should all sleep in one bed.  Charlie slept on one side, Diego and Sofia in the middle and I slept on the other to keep Sofia from falling.  Carlos stayed home.  Surprisingly we all slept decently.  As usual, the kids enjoyed relocating the rocks and searching for shells.  They filled up bags of shells, sorted and priced them for their store.  Unfortunately their store stayed open about 20 minutes before they got bored with the low foot traffic and poor response. We had a good discussion about business models and they agreed that popsicles by the tennis courts might sell better than seashells by the beach.  We had nice walks on the beach, trips to the pool and tennis lessons.  Pretty nice!    

 The end of school means the end of soccer and little league.  Carlos was pretty happy to finish his coaching duties for Diego's team, but we were sad to see the end of Charlie's season.  Instead of having a parent coach his soccer on the hill team, his normal soccer instructor (during the week) was the coach and most of the kids were friends from Brent.  It was a fun group and Charlie really enjoyed himself.  Coach David is always so positive and encouraging and all the kids adore him.  I noticed that Charlie isn't very aggressive during practice. He usually does much better during games, but he doesn't have the tenacity that some of the other kids have nor does he have the fine ball skills. I'm really amazed by some of the 6-7 year olds playing soccer - their ball handling skills are really impressive.

 In baseball Charlie is one of the best fielders on his team, but not great at hitting the ball.  I find it a bit of mystery given how much baseball he plays.  When the weather is nice Carlos takes the boys to X park before school to hit balls and it is the highlight of their day.   Charlie has been disappointed in his hitting during games and it makes me so sad.  I don't care that he doesn't hit the ball, but I do care that he is disappointed!  Diego smacks the ball no problem during his games though he needs a bit more strength to turn the hits into home runs.  I lost his mitt so he played his last game with out one, but the rockstar that he is, he was playing first base and caught the ball bare-handed for a nice out.