The Season...

Oh, la, but we've had quite the time this season with our oldest minion.

Honestly, At this point I'm at a loss as to what to do with him. James is in the fourth grade and back at the beginning of the winter he decided he wanted to play basketball with his school's team. We weren't super keen on it because we pretty much think that Little League in any form is a gigantic suck of family time but he seemed excited about it so we decided to let him do it. After the first practice we got an e-mail saying that he wasn't good enough to be on the fourth grade team and if he wanted to play he'd need to play with the third grade team. We made the monumentally bad decision to go with that. I blogged about it. 

Since then, the fourth grade team  (the one he wasn't good enough to play on) went on to win the championship and his team went on to lose every game, by, a lot.  All this to say that he now feels incredibly alienated from the rest of his classmates who played on the team. Everywhere he looks it's 'Congrats Fourth Graders For Winning the Championship' and the like.

This is all coupled with the fact that he is having some difficulties amongst his classmates. In December he came home and told me that he was in a club  (The Gummymores) with one other person and everyone else was in the other club (The Bananas). I knew then that that was not going to end well. I asked him why the clubs couldn't just join up and be one big club and he said, get this, 'Mom, that would be like walking into Mordor and handing Sauron the ring.' My poor kid. If anything sealed his fate on the fringes that statement did.

Just typical fourth grade stuff but still hard on him. Suffice it to say it's a lot for a shy and socially awkward nine year old to bear.

Last week he came up to me and asked if we could cancel his birthday party. Good thing I never got around to sending those invites. He went from wanting to invite every boy in the fourth grade to not being confident enough to invite any.

I don't know...I can't go to school and oversee him making friends. He just has to trudge though this alone. I can't homeschool him. I've got a seven year old that LOVES school. And just between you and me, I've got Math issues - bad ones. 

Two weeks ago I got a babysitter for tomorrow night. The high school team is playing my old alma mater and we were excited about going to the game. Then, tonight, I found out the fourth grade team is going to be honored at the basketball game at half time. When James heard that he looked at me and said 'well, that's gonna be awkward.' And then he started to tear up.

"Oooh! James would be mad at you if he knew you were blogging about his business!"

My kid...he needs some wins. And some friends. And some dad gum self confidence. And parents who don't worry about it. But  mostly he needs Jesus. As do I.

Y'all can pray for us. And feel free to leave some advice.