Dine and Dash

See this. This is a crock pot. Also known as dinner for the next 8 weeks. Well that may be a bit of a stretch, but it's certainly going to be dinner for the next eight Wednesdays as we try to find a way to eat either before, or after soccer practices.

We have a love-hate relationship with the crock pot. Fortunately, at least three of us love it and two of those are our soccer players. But if anyone knows of good slow cooker recipes, we're all ears.

One of the biggest stresses of the soccer season isn't the time spent at the field; it's not the drives to the new fields, or finding the right uniforms, or finding clean uniforms, or cleats that fit, or, now that we also have a soccer ref in the family, a watch that is still running. The thing that always threatens to drive us over the edge is finding a way to get meals -- not on the table, let's be realistic -- but at least get them into people's mouths.

And it's not just dinners. Our season begins tomorrow with one of our busiest weekends of the season. Matthew starts with back to back referee assignments at 8 am, followed by a rec game here in town at 10:30, and then he rides up to Lancaster, Mass for 1:30 warmup for his premier game. Gives a whole other meeting to the phrase Dine and Dash.

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Tonight was also my first house team practice -- it's a U10 team made up of six boys who play town travel at different levels, 1 boy who plays premier travel, and 3 boys who play rec league only. We had five kids at practice -- which was just about the perfect number. The boys all got lots of touches on the ball, there was no standing around, and I could keep them mostly under control.  We've also had one practice with our Challenger coaches - paid coaches who come over from England for the season to work with our town's program. We had six out of 10 there.

Tomorrow is the team's first game, which should be interesting, given that half of the team hasn't even met the other half.

--michael