the rewards of persistence

I am afraid of football. Mostly just in terms of my children playing it. All the crashing into each other and trying to do bodily harm makes me nervous. So. I put Tommy on his very first soccer team at 3 1/2, as soon as he was old enough to play. I like soccer. It seemed like the perfect sport to try to push my poor kid into. We spent the next three seasons of soccer with the simple goal of getting through the game without tears. We seldom succeeded. Tommy understood what soccer was supposed to look like and he understood that he wasn't quite there yet. He is not a terribly patient kid and he has little tolerance for less than perfection. In all three of those seasons he scored a grand total of 2 goals. This lack of performance did not make him a happy camper. Every season I gave him the option of opting out, always expecting he would but he never did, he always wanted to play. Saturday was the first game of the season (really the second but the first was cancelled due to weather). Tommy scored four goals. Four. He has no idea how to be a good sport about such things because he has never, ever been very successful at this particular endeavor. All of the sudden he knows what he's doing. He steals the ball, he dribbles down the field, he scores in the appropriate net. He couldn't hardly contain his excitement and I don't blame him. It's been a long time coming.