This past weekend was Kaiden's End of Season Soccer Party.  It was bittersweet. This was a great group of girls and a good group of parents. The girls got along well and the parents all got along well. A couple of weeks ago we had two weeks of hellish tryouts. We decided to have Kaiden try out for both Beach FC and Rush, to keep options open.  This past year, she played for the U11 Beach FC "B" Travel Team - there are three travel teams in that age group, A, B and C.  A lot of the girls in the photo above will split up next year.  Three are moving up to the Beach FC "A" team, several are staying with the Beach FC "B" team and three of them have made the decision to accept the offer from Rush's "A" team.  Kaiden is one of the one's that is moving to Rush.

Kaiden, two of her teammates and one of the girls from Beach FC's current "A" team were all offered spots on Rush's Premier "A" team. It was a really hard decision to leave Beach FC.  Kaiden loved it there, but we feel that by moving her, she will have a more difficult and more competitive level of play, which will help her grow and get better.  It is more expensive than Beach, and we now have to purchase an entire new uniform kit, but we are okay with it.  Hopefully we will see great things from Kaiden in the upcoming year.

The hardest part of the whole thing is these four girls splitting up.  They have become so close over the last year and I love seeing them all together.  Two are going to Beach "A" team, one is staying with Beach "B" Team and one is going to Rush "A" team. Kaiden will still play hockey with one of them, her buddy Ali, so she is happy about that.  And they have all pinky-promised each other that they will still get together all the time. I am sure we will see them on the fields.

This kind of stuff is hard for me to watch Kaiden go through.  Really hard.

THE NEW SIDING IS FINALLY GOING UP ON THE HOUSE!!!  Do I sound excited? I AM!!! We moved in a year ago and on Friday, new siding for the entire house was delivered. By the time I got home from work on Friday, Todd had already ripped all of the crappy. ugly, disgusting wood siding off of the porch area of the house.

I was surprised he had already done that... and at the same time I was like SWEET! LETS DO THIS!!! So he spent all day Saturday and Sunday replacing siding on the porch and putting up pretty bright white soffit on the ceiling.  His buddy Cleatus watched intently from the window inside.

The porch looks amazing with the new siding.  We are doing Cedar Shake on the front of the house and a higher end regular siding on the sides and back of the house.  He rounded the corner of the porch to let me see what it would look like.

We also bought all new light fixtures for the outside of the house, three for front, side and back and then a matching fourth one that is a motion detector for above the garage.  They look great.

He had a crew come over to the house two days this week and get the garage area done and he will work on the side of the house this weekend, sending a crew over to help when he can.  He is having all new gutters and downspouts being made right now and all windows, doorways, garage door frame, etc will all be wrapped in metal.  It is going to look like a completely different house when we are done.  We painted the front porch swing black and will be painting all the shutters and front door black.  Cannot wait to see it when it is all done.