Cars & Basketball

So the title's a little backwards. Tonight has been a very busy, yet fun and exciting night. Shortly after I got home from work, PC & I dropped Girl off at the gym so that she could watch the 5th and 6th grade basketball games before hers. Then, off to the store to do a quick grocery shop, run home to start dinner, put the groceries away, eat dinner and get back out the door in under an hour to get back to the gym for her game. In this pic, she is the one with the lighter color hair. I kept missing all the good shots because it takes my stupid camera so long to actually take the picture once the button clicks.


Our team played the rival Catholic school from the North Side of Town...othewise known as the Rich Kids. Most of them are REALLY nice, but there's kind of a Cubs/Sox, North Side/South Side rivalry between the schools. It's a lot of fun and we're all familiar with all of the kids on the other team as well, since they've been playing each other forever. Here Girl had just inbounded the ball.


Gee - before the inbound this time. I would love to have gotten some of her action shots. One of the girls on the other team is a friend that she plays with on her traveling softball team. Girl catches and the other girl pitches...so they're very good at reading each other. Girl and N always end up on each other in basketball. I don't know if the coaches set it up that way because they know how well the two of them play or if they just ultimately both end up in the same position. Oh, that reminds me, in grade school, at least in Catholic grade school, they don't NAME the positions, they number them..."You play 1, Girl you're at 3, Little B at 5, etc..." Girl plays them all and plays them all well.


Ok, here's that action shot. She's the blurry one on the far side of the shot...the little blurb of white shirt just to the side of the far away girl in black. When I clicked to take this shot, Girl was behind the close girl in black and MUCH closer to me. I'm pretty certain they were on defense at this point. It was SUCH a tight game all the way through. Girl played hard. This game, though, she didn't foul out. She did get tripped and thrown to the floor a couple times, but that's just cuz they know how good she is.


Standing on the line waiting to shoot her foul shots. There was NO WAY that I was going to shoot during the shots and distract her. I know better. We were down by two and Girl had taken the perfect shot, but the foul kept her ball from dropping. There were only about 10 seconds left on the clock that would start again immediately after the second free throw. First one missed. Damn! Ok, miss the second, go for the rebound and the shot for the tie. Second one missed, but there was a foul and we got the ball back. Girl threw in the ball, but the girl she threw it to got sandwiched and she lost possession. The player on the other team, seeing 3 seconds left, just bounced it. Buzzer, game over. So SAD. BUT they played well and had no problems with the loss except that the coach seemed to having a problem calling time-outs to save his players when they were obviously trapped. Oh well.


Enough about basketball....now for an update on the car: SmallBoy and PC took on the task of painting it today. PC had gone back to the BSA store and found some great metallic-looking race car paint and some killer accessories - a fin, lake pipes, and an "engine". I'll show you pics of that assembled later. But here, stepdad and stepson were continuing their bonding time and working together on their project. They look so intense in these pictures, don't they?


Notice PC's silver paint stained fingers. He sacrificed his skin to hold the car while SmallBoy painted with the spongetip brush. Surprisingly, this process took only a few minutes. I figured it would take them forever, a couple of coats, blah blah blah. Nope got it done before I even knew they had started.

My guys are having so much fun together doing this project and I am SO enjoying it. I can see PC beaming with fatherly pride (which is a hell of a lot more than SmallBoy's dad would do) and as much as I am, enjoying watching the excitement of this project and watching SmallBoy get so ecstatic at the completion of each and every step of this process.

Oh I cannot WAIT to show you all the finished project. See, you're all in trouble now that my camera works again. I'm going to be filling my articles with pictures and you will tire of seeing my endless photos of my family....LOL, but I won't!