Friday Fragments

Leftovers from last night.

Teenagers aren't really people

Last night I made sweet potato soup. I doubled a recipe that was "for four people". I also made focaccia from scratch. This recipe was for "eight people". In addition to that, because I have one boy who doesn't like sweet potatoes, I added two cans of condensed tomato soup, which, according to the cans, should feed "five people" (truthfully it says "five serves").
So the soup should have covered thirteen people! With the focaccia it should have covered more, unless the authors of the recipes are holding something back here.

Last night's meal.

But look at what I'd had left this morning. A small piece of focaccia and two small servings of sweet potato soup. Granted the focaccia was so delicious that I ate more of it than I would have normally, but still!

Obviously my 11, 14, and 17 year olds are eating more than an ordinary "person" does. I think last night they ate even more than they usually do.

I'm not complaining. I like cooking for them and I love that they woof my food down and give me honest critiques. For example, the sweet potato soup was supposed to have coconut milk in it, but I slipped up and didn't have any in the house. So I used low fat yoghurt instead. It didn't taste as good as it has in the past and the boys noticed that. When I explained, one said, "Well, that makes sense!"

Scintillating dinner conversation

Dinner conversation included a lot of talk about wrestling. This week the high school team has had weigh-ins for the big end-of-season meet in Korea (our son only "made weight" by basically not eating all day . . . it was announced with only three days to spare and he was caught unawares). Last night they also had "wrestle-offs" as well as mock "duels". He and his assistant-coach dad only made it home after 7pm.

These are technical terms, I know. A "wrestle-off" is two team mates going up against one another to determine who makes the A team (and this was also for the Korean tournament). 

A "duel" is just one team vs another. Together work their way through the weight classes, usually from lightest to heaviest, each team putting out their relevant wrestler for each class. Points are scored for the team, depending on how comprehensive the win was. If one team has a wrestler for that class and the other doesn't, then the first team "wins" that bout and gets the maximum points. 

It's a different style to the tournament style (like the Olympics) where there are many wrestlers in each weight class and they work their way up to a wrestle-off between to top two wrestlers that day.

Tomorrow's high school meet is a duel-meet. Six teams attending, but each team only goes up against three other teams. 

I'm going to a third type of wrestling meet tomorrow. The middle school meet. It's a round-robin tournament. The wrestlers are divided into groups of about four of equivalent weights and each one wrestles all the others in their group. The one who's won the most, gets gold for that group.

So dinner talk was about who beat who, who missed out on the top spots to go to Korea, etc. As well as concern for team-mates struggling with injuries and talk about tomorrow's tournaments.

On Monday I had another missionary mum from our mission say to me that she loves sport and looks forward to supporting her kids in sport (they are younger). "But, wrestling. . . ?" She left that hanging out there in the air.

Among other things I said, "It's good to learn to love the sport that your kids love, even if it isn't something you would naturally lean towards."

We've learned to love wrestling. It's five years, now, since we first started going to watch our son wrestle and I truly do enjoy watching it. To the point where I'm very disappointed that I won't be able to watch both our sons wrestle live each Saturday in the coming weeks.

But more than anything, it's been a common language that we can speak with our son. Our younger two have been watching wrestling since they were 6 and 9. They've both had a go at it and they both speak the language too. I treasure this. These days they're venturing into territory that I don't understand, particularly in online games. And have vocab in those special areas that I don't have. So I'm very glad that we still have this common language of sport that we can connect with.

Transport tangles

This relates to wrestling too. The two meets tomorrow are in two different schools, more than an hour from each other, and from us. As is our practise, we're car pooling with local parents-friends who are also going to support their kids. But with several friends of ours who have kids in both middle and high school teams, it's getting confusing.

In a Messenger group last night between these friends of ours I got this message (I've edited it a little):

Hello. I was wondering if any of you would have room for one person on Jan 21 Yokota. And/or if you have room for one to Zama and two to St Marys on the 28th?

These proper nouns are school names. 

We're taking into account 

• four families,
• seven wrestlers from those families,
• eight non-wrestling siblings, 
• two eight-seater vans, and 
• two meets in different locations each Saturday for the next four weekends. 

Completely confusing. This little conversation went on for a bit and got worse before I suggested that we do it one weekend at a time, but not until the week before the relevant weekend. 

We've sorted tomorrow. My van has six people in it going to Yokota (US air base school) and our friend's van has eight going to ASIJ (American School in Japan). Let's hope it works out okay! 

My alarm will be set for before 6. Departure 6.50am. 

Being a middle school meeting, though, it won't be a long one. Probably we'll be home by mid afternoon . . . hopefully.