The Saturday 7

1. We did it! We survived another year of Soccer Camp! It was a family affair again this year. I'm on the planning committee, Justin was a coach, Lucy worked in the nursery, Lena worked with the kindergarteners, and Levi participated as a camper. Theoretically, most of my work is done before camp actually starts, since I'm in charge of marketing, graphics, some parts of registration, and getting snack and concessions up and running. But there are always fires to put out, last minute changes to accommodate, and endless ways to help with all the moving parts that make up such a large event. It was a record breaking year for us, as we averaged 200 campers each night!

2. I love soccer camp week even if it is exhausting and chaotic. I didn't make dinner once all week (except for the meatball subs I prepared for the set-up crew . . . although I'm not sure pre-made meatballs and a jar of spaghetti sauce count as "making dinner"). I threw loads of laundry into the machines throughout the week, but never folded anything. And I only remembered to shower when I explicitly wrote it on my to-do list. Lol. But it's such a great experience to be involved in - especially from my position behind the computer screen in the air conditioned office. 😂 I get to wear the special red "staff" t-shirt, and get a lot of credit for my part in making camp happen, but the real heroes are the coaches like Justin. He worked full time all week, at his manual labor job out in the heat, came home long enough to change and get ready, then jetted off to church to wrangle 18 3rd and 4th graders in even more heat, with energy, excitement, and joy. And his wife didn't even make him dinner!

3. I also had some time-sensitive school development projects to work on this week, so of course I felt overwhelmed and frazzled most of the time. I either need to come up with a better system to juggle my responsibilities, I need to learn how to handle them without getting so stressed, or I need to cut some out of my life. Because what I have going on now just isn't sustainable. I'm going to be in the nut-house before long. (Although, honestly, a quiet room and good meds doesn't sound all that bad . . .) I'm not willing to cut my family or my jobs that actually generate an income, so that leaves me with my church responsibilities: the library and soccer camp. Soccer camp is only part of my schedule over about 4 months of the year, but I finally sat down and made a list of everything I do over that 4 months - and there were 59 items on the list. I need to offload about 30 of them. Lol. Fortunately, the library is pretty self-sustaining. It doesn't require a lot from me right now. I just have to be intentional about not creating more work for myself. I keep coming up with ideas that would be fun, or help drive traffic to the library, but I have to remind myself I don't have the time or capacity to do it all! Boo. Being responsible is a drag.

4. One of our soccer camp snafus this week was photography. It's always hard to find someone with the right skills willing to give so much of their time and energy to this busy week. We had a great lady this year, but she ended up having a family emergency on the last day, so we were without an official photographer. It's not the first time I've found myself wishing I had the equipment and skills to do it myself. Honestly, I can take decent pictures with my phone - especially if the subjects are close and still. But I want to be able to zoom in on a kid in motion on the soccer field and get the same precise quality that I do with portrait mode on my android. I'm seriously considering buying myself a used DSLR and learning how to use it. My dad is a professional photographer, and YouTube is full of tutorials. How hard can it be to learn? 😜 That said, I also got an alert from Google that my Pixel 6a battery is corrupted or something and needs to be replaced. They'll either replace the battery for free, or give me a credit toward a new phone. Should I take what I would spend on a used DSLR and put it toward a better phone instead? Can phones really take professional quality pictures? (Especially if I'm not willing to switch to an iPhone?) Case in point: the photographer and I both caught a picture of a kid doing something funny with the net during Soccer Camp. This is my phone picture:

This is her camera picture:

5. Soccer Camp is just Monday through Thursday, so yesterday we spent the day recovering. Lena and her friend Harper have been angling to have a play date all summer, so we finally made it happen. I enjoyed spending a few hours catching up with Kelly. And Levi enjoyed playing with the dog.

Can you spot the pepperoni in mid air? 😂

Lena and Harper have been working for weeks to prepare for the Kids' Market this Wednesday. They've both gotten really into crocheting, and have made the cutest little animals and hand sanitizer holders and all kinds of stuff. They worked on their price list yesterday, and are excited to set up on Wednesday evening. If you're local and want to make their day by purchasing a $6 crocheted lemon or stingray, shoot me a message for details about the event. 😁

5. Last night, Justin's parents took us out to dinner at Outback for our anniversary. (So I didn't have to make dinner again!) I ate bread and salad and fried chicken and some of a shared brownie dessert, plus three glasses of full-sugar Dr Pepper. It was amazing.

6. I read an interesting book today. It's an old one that most people have already read, but I just got my hands on a copy for the first time: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. It's one of those books like The Anxious Generation or Remaking the World that I love because it combines a few of my favorite things: history, knowledge about something I didn't previously know, and how the two work together to create society as we know it. I'm realizing that I really appreciate an author who does extensive research and then explains it in an accessible way. Outliers is an interesting look at how success is truly achieved. Especially in America, we think of success as a formula: talent/skill/intelligence + hard work = success. But that's not always (or as Gladwell argues, ever) true. There are so many layers to outstanding success that most people don't see or even recognize. He gives really interesting examples about why not everyone with an astonishing IQ is successful. And why Asians are better at math than their international contemporaries. And why 14 of the top 75 billionaires of all time existed in America in the 1930s. He attributes a lot of their success to "happy accidents": the random events that create the perfect storm of family background, current economy, personality, and opportunity. From a Christian perspective, it's interesting to see it as God's hand of sovereignty through it all. It's actually kind of freeing. Certainly, a great deal of anyone's personal success is attributed to the opportunities they've been given and what they choose to do with them. But it's God that gives the opportunities, and that places people in their exact time and place.

It's also interesting to ponder what people consider success. One of the stories toward the end of the book was meant to be an inspiration, but actually left me feeling sad. It was about these new schools popping up around the nation called KIPP schools. They set up in extremely impoverished urban areas, and admit students entirely by lottery. The one Gladwell talked about was a middle school in New York. These schools take the desperately poor kids who have no opportunity to escape their circumstances and turn them into academic prodigies who overwhelmingly make it into top colleges and successful careers. The catch is that school dominates the students' lives. They attend M-F from 7:25a-5:00p, Saturdays from 7:25a-1p, and have hours of homework each night. It works because the longer days allow for less rushed learning. Teachers are able to really hone in on each topic and ensure their students gain mastery of it before moving on. But the kids have no social lives, and very little home life. One 12 year old explained that she woke up at 5:45 each morning in order to get ready and catch the bus to school. She got home at 5:45 pm, worked on homework all night (unless her mom made her take a break for dinner), told her mom about her school day at 10:45 as she got ready for bed, then got up and did it all over again the next day. Maybe these schools are churning out success stories, but to what end?

7. Ok, this is long enough! Time for pics. No memes because I didn't have time to scroll this week.