Marcus Plays Ball with Girls

And he doesn't even mind.  Well, not too much anyway.  Desperate times call for desperate measures.  As soon as we moved in I tried to get Marcus and Ethan signed up for soccer.  The season had already started but I begged and finally the lady in charge said she could put Marcus on a team while Bean was wait-listed (apparently adding one more kid to a team is a very big deal).  A few weeks went by and finally Marcus's "coach" (I use the term loosely since he's just a parent of one of the players) sent me a reluctant email inviting Marcus to the next practice.  By that point we had missed half the season and the coach didn't even have a shirt for Marcus so he really would've felt like an outcast.  Luckily I got a refund.A month later I heard about soccer tryouts for a competitive traveling soccer team and told Marcus to dust off his cleats and start practicing.  Thirty-five kids tried out for eleven spots and Marcus was one of the eleven.  Hallelujah!  Then the bad news:  All practices and games were on Sundays.  Since we try to avoid sports on the Sabbath Marcus was once again unable to play. 
So when I got a flier in the mail about an indoor soccer clinic I immediately acted on it.  Then the bad news came that not enough people were interested.  What?  What elementary-aged kid doesn't want to play soccer at an indoor facility in the middle of winter?  So they postponed the start day, scrounged up some players and yesterday, finally, Marcus got to play soccer.  That's the good news.  The bad news:  Only three boys signed up.  The rest were girls.  Twenty girls to be exact.  Poor kid.  Not that there's anything wrong with girls but when you're of the age where you think all girls have cooties and you try to ignore their existence, playing a scrimmage with one is not necessarily a good thing.  I was prepared to give him a big pep talk and tell him to have fun anyway but I didn't need to.  Marcus was so happy to finally be playing soccer again he was grinning from ear to ear.