In Which Cat Plays Soccer

This season Cat scored 44 goals - more than the school's previous career goals record for men or women.  Her career total at the end of her Junior year is 92.  She scored the 2nd most goals in all of 2A, and 3rd in the state across all divisions.  Her coach (jokingly) called it "gross."  (See below video at the end-of-season banquet).  She's still having tons of fun on and off the field with this team, and here is a smattering of photos from the season, in no particular order.

I was hoping for a great pic of Cat after her first home game as captain,
but she was pretty worn out.  It was worth a shot!

Cat was tying her cleat while the team huddled before their final game,
but it looked like she was kneeling in prayer, haha.

It was a tough season-ending loss in the quarterfinals.
The team they lost to ended up winning state.

Do you recognize this noteworthy guest?
Elder Rasband is the grandfather of one of Cat's teammates and watched
one of the away games.  I teased Cat for kicking an opponent in the knees
while Elder Rasband was watching and she replied, very honestly,
that she always kicks people in the knees.  So there.

Plank Day.  You'll have to ask Cat about it.

Cat's Recruiting Trip

Were you wondering why Cat wasn't in any of our Halloween pictures?  It's because she was otherwise engaged that weekend... on the east coast.

Rob Dahl, the women's soccer coach at SVU, invited Cat to travel to Buena Vista, VA to get a close-up view of the soccer program there.  This was her first official campus visit as a prospective student, and her first time traveling completely independently.  She did great - especially considering it turned out to be a rough travel day!  We left the house at 4:15am for a 6am flight.  Shortly after we took the below picture and she boarded the plane, she was told there was a maintenance delay.  She sat on the plane for about an hour and a half before it finally took off, and she missed her connection flight in Charlotte.  She waited in the Charlotte airport for hours, finally leaving for Roanoke at 6pm.  Then her cousin Dayna and her husban Devon picked her up and drove the hour to Buena Vista.  I hated it for her, and we were so worried she'd be stuck in Charlotte overnight.  The bright side is that she had a little extra time to work on homework...

Cat had a great weekend!  Since had lots of time with cousins Cassy and Dayna, and spent the night at Dayna and Devon's apartment.  They watched movies, did nails, walked around Buena Vista, and did homework together.  It turned out that this was Senior Day for Dayna, who's on the dance team.  Cat was included in the group of family escorting Dayna onto the field during the football game when Dayna was recognized.

SVU is small, so the campus tour didn't take very long.  And I was proud of her for taking advantage of her cousin's student status and connections and attending a few classes.  She even met a biology professor who let her hold a cadaver brain.  Whoa.

Because of her messed-up travel day on Thursday, and the practice time on Friday changing, she didn't end up with very much time to practice with the team, but she spent time with the team and watched them play a tournament game, and she feels like she has a better understanding of the program now.

SVU has been on Cat's radar for a few years so I'm really thankful she could take this trip so that when the time comes it will help her make an informed decision about where to attend college.

Halloween

We had a great Halloween weekend!  On Friday the kids wore their costumes to school, and I watched Eliza and Luke's Halloween parade in chilly weather (but thankful it wasn't as cold as past years).  Both kids were walking so fast I hardly had time to snap pictures of them.  Can you guess what their costumes are?

I helped with Eliza's class party, bringing a TP-mummy-wrapping game and a candy-corn-chopsticks game.  (Eliza requested the TP game and I was hesitant to waste toilet paper after The Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020, but when I went to Walmart and saw that they actually had 4-packs of toilet paper for $.60, I relented.)  After school, Luke and his friend showed me the little ghost lights they'd made in their class.  Luke named his ghost Tom.  That night Luke helped me make a Jack-O-Lantern pizza for dinner, and Eliza went to the Lindon Halloween Bash with two friends.

On Saturday we did the Fall activities Luke had been requesting: raking leaves and jumping in the pile and carving pumpkins.  He was SO HAPPY, and the rest of us had a good time too.  It's nice to have a younger kiddo around to help us get hyped and have fun.

In the evening we went to our ward's chili cookoff and trunk-or-treat.  Earlier in the week, during the same shopping trip when I'd bought the cheapest toilet paper imaginable, I realized I had no plan for decorating the van for the trunk-or-treat.  I did a quick Google search for ideas and decided that we had nearly enough props to be able to pull off a Hogwarts trunk, and would only need to buy a few things to complete the look.  I excitedly told the kids later that day and they were a bit puzzled.  "But Mom, none of us are dressed as Harry Potter characters."  True.  I filed this in the back of my mind and approximately 30 minutes before the activity started that night, inspiration struck, and I decided that I would be Moaning Myrtle and Ben would be Harry Potter.  Ben was a good sport and it all came together pretty well.

Luke: MIB Agent
(he drew the blood on himself)

Eliza: Zombie Vsco Girl
(for the other dress-up occasions, she was a regular live Vsco Girl)

Jack: Raptor Owen
(from Jurassic World - part Blue and part Owen)

Our city didn't have an official day designated for trick-or-treating, but our friends and neighbors were all planning to go out Saturday night.  So, Eliza and her friend left the Church with Luke, trick-or-treating their way back to our house.  Jack wasn't happy with us for telling him he was too old to go trick-or-treating, but got excited about trying to liven up the evening by giving kids a little scare when they came to our house.  He kept his raptor mask on and pretended to be asleep in a chair with the front door open, then startled awake, opening the jaw to make the mask roar, when someone came for candy.  We had very few trick-or-treaters and I suspect it had something to do with Jack's unconventional presentation.

(Luke's Jack-o-lantern is on the left,
Jack's Gourd-zilla is in the middle,
and Eliza's Frankenstein's Monster is on the right.)

On Sunday afternoon we ventured out on a Halloween-ish excursion: driving to the nearest gh0ost town.  Thistle, UT isn't a ghost town in the conventional sense: the tiny town in Spanish Fork Canyon was buried by a landslide in 1983.  There's not much left, but we found a few buildings on the side of the highway.  This one in the middle of a pond is a bit surreal:

For dinner that night everyone helped make Dinner in a Pumpkin.  But it was not a success: I liked it, nobody else did.  And after one or two failed attempts at making variations of this festive dinner in the past, I've now decided ... I'm done.

There was exactly one trick-or-treater at our house Sunday night.

Utah.