June 2006: World Cup Mania

Well if you know Mike very well or at all, you should know that he loves soccer. In fact that's the greatest understatement. Owen was born during the 2002 World Cup and luckily for me, the games were on at 3 AM, so Mike & Owen would watch the games together. This year, you might be aware that the World Cup is every 4 years, Mike could not wait for the tournament to begin. He would call me up in the middle of the day and say "guess what?" or "I have something very important to tell you", "the World Cup starts in 'such a such' of days (or hours)". Almost everytime I really thought he would have something new to say. So we got the picture that it was pretty important to "Daddy". We made poster-size charts of all the groups with all the flags and Owen drew a soccer field of players. He did great. It was the first time I could actually tell that Owen was trying hard to draw something and one of the first times I had seen him write his name. We bought USA flags and hats, soccer decorations, and got Mike's own soccer stuff down to decorate the TV/exercise room. We surprised him and he loved it. We are down to the "Round of 16" and are trying to be patient with the amount of soccer viewed as yes, it only comes around every 4 years, Mike keeps reminding us. Don't I have the cutest boys? Poor Eyan, the hat was too big. I was laughing so hard trying to take these pictures.