easy Friday!

Whew! It’s Friday and we made it through another week of the same ol’ same ol’. Because it’s Friday and it’s basketball season, my plans are simple. Fridays are a nice slow evening, starting with Reanna’s basketball practice where I will need to stop and get drinks and provide the team pizza. Normally we do this on Monday’s but because I had so many things to do on Monday and because the kids didn’t really score 20 points in their last game, I put it off til Friday. Seven ten year old girls, all of them with the attention span of 10 year old girls, who knows there’s pizza waiting for them, and still we prevail. We practice shots and defense and whatever a two three is and the play where the one girl throws it to the other girl. You know that play. All the teams do it.
After the practice and the pizza we take that nice leisurely drive to the high school. There’s about 10 minutes between cleaning up the pizza and the start of Raina’s game so leisurely is not really the right adverb but it sounds less frantic and goes with the simple plans of Friday. We make our way through the crowds that are usually there to watch the varsity boys so we scurry like mice to the opposite gym. We wind our way around up and over to find any seat still available and firmly plant our butts. You see, if our seats weren’t firmly planted it would be harder to get bleacher butt. From this position we can watch girls twice the size of our darling Raina, elbow, knee, slap, punch, sock and even kick our baby. We cheer her on and tell her to “battle” back. At least that’s the term we have to use in the gym because for some reason when we say fight the coach doesn’t appreciate it. This is a long grueling game. I feel every elbow and every bump. She get’s her first unfair foul called and I calmly remind myself, hey fouls are part of the game. By the second foul I’m sure the guy is blind and by the third I’m offering him my glasses. Let’s face it. There is no way my perfect little angel would ever commit a foul unless her dictator coach made her do it, and he’s just not that kind of coach. My daughter would never do anything wrong. By the third foul I’m sure she’s going to foul out but that would make her dad proud. He seems to think if you’re not fouling you’re not playing hard enough. She shoots and it bounces off the rim. She catches her own rebound and someone grabs her arm, swings her around like a rag doll and lofts her like an Olympic hammer in the track event. She slides across the floor and that’s when they call a foul. On her! What? Those zebra guys are blind. How could she have been the one to commit the foul? I don’t know that I can ever trust the vision of a zebra.
I like to refer to that fourth foul as the call of the wild. You see a call like that is one that brings the mama lion out in me and I know a mama lion can take down a zebra and I’m ready to do it. I get into my best crouched lion pose and just as I’m ready to leap, the king of the jungle places his mighty hand on my shoulder and tells me to sit back down. I start my best lioness roar and tell the zebra if he’s going to allow my daughter to get thrown across the gym floor, and then call a foul on her…. If he’s going to let someone hurt my daughter, he and I will have words after the game. That ends up being the last foul she gets.
Maybe I should just have a talk with the zebra’s before the games? I obviously intimidate them, me and my big lioness mouth, me and my fierce lioness roar. Or could it be the king of the jungle’s paw as he keeps me back from devouring the stupid blind zebra. Maybe the size of the lion paw is what stops the stupid zebra, either way the zebra lives another day and it’s time to find something to feed the king and the cubs. Dinner? Yikes, it’s 9:00 and Reanna has a game at 8:00 am. Can’t we just skip it tonight?
Nope the lion family has to eat and the zebra’s have left the building. That’s when the real work of Friday’s begins. I’m getting so tired just thinking about it, I think I’ll order take out early tonight!