The Raiders

The Cheese had his first two flag football practices this weekend. They look like a pretty tough bunch don't you think?


Actually, I thought it was pretty cute how all of the kids wore some of their favorite team jerseys. The little boy next to the Cheese was wearing a USC jersey. Never have a Sooner and a Trojan stood so closely together without wanting to beat the crap out of each other. Thank goodness the Cheese didn't pick his UCLA jersey to wear. Then we really would have had a problem.


As the Golfer likes to say, it doesn't matter if you're small as long as you're fast. When he first put on his football cleats, he said, "I feel faster already!"

By the way, I felt like such a girl when I went to buy his cleats. For a brief moment, I though about just having him wear his baseball cleats that we just bought last spring, but I knew the Golfer would not approve and besides, I don't want to be that mom. I know that soccer cleats, and football cleats, and baseball cleats are all different in some way, but honestly it's just all a big racket to sell more shoes.


After two practices, the Cheeses strengths are starting to show. Amazingly enough, the one drill that he is really good at has to do with blocking. Thank goodness I bought those cleats, he really uses them to dig in.

The coach put them in their first formation during a drill at the second practice, and put the Cheese on the line of scrimmage as a guard. As the three coaches set up all of the kids and were trying to show them what they were going to do, the Cheese must have thought that he heard the whistle because the next thing I know, his plowing into the kid that he was covering, knocking him to the ground and falling on top of him. This poor kid of course started to cry, more scared than anything, and headed for the sidelines. The Cheese had gotten back up, back into his "football ready" stance, but was wiping away his own tears, obviously upset that he had knocked down a team mate and worried that he had done something wrong.

There's no crying in football!

One of the coaches saved the day by basically telling him that he did exactly what they wanted him to do; that he was really strong and tough and that's just what the team needs. I've never seen my extra-sensitive child turn off his tears so quickly. For the rest of the drill, the Cheese continued to play guard, pushing and knocking into anyone in front of him, even the coaches.

Who would have guessed that my child, who has never gone higher that the 20 percentile on the growth chart would be acting like such a linebacker.