Hurts So Good

Yesterday, Little Daughter played her volleyball game! I was a little worried that she’d be nervous to play after the nosebreaking incident last year. She did great and I wish my photography skills matched her spiking skills.

I’m not a photographer and I’m sort of at the mercy of my camera. Outside for soccer, softball and cheerleading shots, I can get some great pictures. Inside, for volleyball games and band concerts with fluorescent gym lighting, I end up with yellow, blurry pictures. One day I will figure out exactly how to correct this. It drives me crazy. but I did get these two!





All four of my kids are definitely athletes, which amazes me because I am so not athletic. At all. Not even a little bit.

The volleyball team has a parent’s night one evening a year where the parents compete against the girls’ volleyball team. I tried to play once, but I tend to duck and shriek when things are flying at me. It’s just not instinctive for me to want to strike back and bounce that flying object back over a net. I did manage to hit it back over one time and my wrists actually stung. I’m a baby, I know.

I’m a sports dork. I can’t play, don’t really know the rules to any of these games and I just don’t think it’s fun enough to risk the pain involved with sports injuries. The kids think it’s totally worth it. My oldest prides herself on the number of paintball welts she gets during a game. That must be what “Hurts So Good” means....

We’ve had plenty of injuries over the years, too. Just last year alone, Oldest Daughter got hit in the eye with a badminton racquet and it completely opened up her eye brow. A plastic surgeon sewed it up beautifully and you can hardly see it... but still. Middle Daughter suffered a broken wrist and a torn ligament in a cheerleading stunt gone bad. Little Daughter had her nose broken at the net with a spiked ball. My son, well, sportswise, he’s been pretty lucky so far, but he does have that Y-chromosome, testosterone induced “Penis Gene” thing to deal with. Most of his injuries are self-induced from doing his own stunt work.

Yet, my kids heal up and go right back to these things. They must all have inherited that fearless cop gene from their father because they certainly didn’t get it from me!