We spent half the day yesterday, cleaning our house here in Connecticut, yes, we are back home as of Saturday evening, and I felt that the house was…….. smelly. So I utilized the labor of my own self, and my children. The house is now lighter, cleaner, and fresher so this morning I was able to do other things……..namely, football related mom chores.

Caleb and Seth are signed up to play football again this fall. Caleb will be on the HS JV varsity team and Seth will be in youth. Seth needed cleats and I needed to drop off their physical forms at the doctors so the two of us had an outing this morning. I’m an early bird so we we were done with the doctor’s office with half an hour to spare before the sports store opened so……. Target, obviously.

Plastic bags are at a premium now, my friends! 10 cents a bag at Target, but if you take your own bag they give you 5 cents. I had no bags. My brain has to learn this new bag situation. I have plenty of reusable fabric bags but there are many ways to forget them at home or in the car, and so I do (forget them). I did manage to only have to buy 3 bags, however, but thirty cents is thirty cents!

We proceeded to the sporting goods store. This was what Seth was waiting for. The best cleats were “order only” so that was a let-down. Then, the hightops he tried to put on his feet were impossible to get on and I became antsy watching him pull and twist and loosen the laces to get them on his feet. “You are NOT going to want to struggle with those every day,” I said, firmly, and we moved on to different pairs. Poor thing had to settle for non-stand-out-basic-black cleats. How utterly “ho-hum”! Then we moved on to cups.

The key here is to, first of all, find the cups in the store (almost impossible), then, when presented with approximately 150 differents ones, find a cup which is comfortable for the boy, and the right size, along with the right size compression shorts that the cup has to slide into. The cups can be S, M, L , XL and the shorts are the same choices and to make things even more confusing, they are packaged in different ways; like, a small cup with a large short for example. So it takes a lot of careful searching. You can also buy JUST the cup, but you can’t (that I could see) buy JUST the short. But what if you buy a cup that’s too small or too big? How do I know what size shorts Seth is? The size was based on inches around the waist. I have no idea what inches Seth is around the waist. I had to take things out of packages and have him hold them to himself. I can’t imagine having a too-small or too-big cup “down there” and then having to run around playing football. By the time we got it figured out I had a fit of the giggles.

I mean, you can’t help but laugh sometimes. Years and years of buying these stupid cups for my five sons…….I’m beyond over it. Yet here I am, still buying the dang things. To me they are one of the ultimate embarrassing things that must be purchased in life. Cups. I don’t even want to mention them, they are an “unmentionable” to me, yet, every night on the way to practice now, I’ll be saying, “Did you put your cup on?” to Seth, just to make sure he’s got his protection. Do I care too little? Never. It’s always always TOO MUCH.

Then, somehow, after I said no 1,000 times to a fancy store-bought flavored mouth-guard, he ended up convincing me he needed a padded compression shirt. It will keep my baby safe so I agreed, then had to figure out what size he needed. “Just take your t-shirt off and try this on,” I said, giving him a boy’s medium. “Right here? in the store? What about a fitting room?” “No, it would take forever n’ever to find a person to unlock the door.” He had no arguement for that, so, off his t-shirt went, onto the floor (naturally) and……. on went the shirt. Well, it went on easily enough, but it wouldn’t come back off. After watching him make the most bizarre body contortions trying to get it off, I finally started taking a video.

I can’t stand the cuteness of this child!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh he is SUCH a dear dear boy. You know, I hugged him in the store and he kinda got away from it and explained, “I don’t like arm pits touching me.” “Well, I was trying not to let it touch you, Seth,” I said, understandingly, in my sleeveless shirt. I tried to hold his hand and he threw it away. When I pushed the cart he held my arm and straightened my posture with his other arm, dramatically making sure I was walking properly and making me feel ancient. He kissed my arm as we walked, he put his hand on my shoulder, he allowed other hugs that didn’t include arm pits. He got on the side of the cart for a ride and made me groan because he’s so heavy now. He laughed at me and with me and for me. He sparkled his eyes at me. He put the stuff in the cart for me at Target and then in the car, and then he put the cart away, “no problem, mom”. He was jolly. My heart was happy to be with him. Of course once I told him so, he got goofy and I had to say, “now you’re just being annoying” but we can be honest with each other and he wasn’t at all offended.

After the sports store (where, once again, I couldn’t get a free plastic bag so I carried my purchases), we went to the bookstore so I could buy the New York Times. When we did our traveling recently I started getting into the habit of buying a newspaper to look at in the car and I greatly enjoyed reading it and clipping out the best gleanings I could find. You know you can find spiritual food in the newspaper, did you know that? It’s fun to look for it. For instance, the article about the terrible droughts in Zimbabwe included the quote, “We are seriously restricted from from living our lives, water is life.” and it immediately made me think of Living Water, God Himself, and how we can’t live without Jesus. So I clipped it out for my scrapbook and wrote the verse underneath.

“Anyone who is thirsty may come to me! Anyone who believes in me may come and drink! For the Scriptures declare, ‘Rivers of living water will flow from his heart.’ ………” John 7:37

Well, guess what. No newspapers are sold in the bookstore any longer. No plastic bags, no newspaper. The plastic bags I can forgive, in fact, I say “good riddance”, but the newspaper???????????? I object to this, highly. So I comforted myself with a new book bag that says, “The World was hers for the Reading”, it’s a Kate Spade bag and I super-love it even though newspapers are no longer hers for the reading, at least the world is. I loved it so much I had Seth take my photo and the first one he took looked like this:

The second one looked like this:

What was in the bag, you ask?

It was a magazine for Seth all about fantasy football because he and his Dad are playing together this year and he wants their team to be good.

We went through the *chick fil a* drive-thru and ate chicken biscuit sandwiches on the way home and had a conversation that went on way too long for my liking about…..orange juice pulp.