Eric Bailey's

Today was my annual trip to the "For the Love of Books" conference (which is conveniently across the street from our church). I was once again the token male. I recognized a few of the faces but I don't know if they recognized me from last year. The person I sat beside was someone I knew from an entirely different context. She works in a day care facility and I used to give a boy a ride home from that day care. It was a good reminder of the different things to teach others (and to do) for reading to their children. I hope that I will get some opportunities to use this program in the schools this year, I like it and enjoy trying to "de-mystify" the idea of reading to children. The point of the program is the impact parents have on their children and importance of sharing your story (your life) with your children.

Football Update:
We started into the last few games of the regular season on Sunday and it started poorly. This was the second time this season that we faced this particular team and the last time we played them we beat them 36-6 in three quarters of football. Once you are up by 30 points, at any point in the fourth quarter, the game is over. This time when we played them, we could not score. They won 14-0. In the fourth quarter I dropped two passes I really should have caught. Other than that I had a pretty good game, I made some pretty big catches early in the game. As a team to win games we simply need to catch the ball more, and our quarterback needs to make some better decisions about who he is going to throw the ball to. I hate to criticize the quarterback because I know it is not easy but he did throw some bad passes and he did not call a very good game. As coach, I need to step up and do something about it too then and I did not do it so I also have a big part of this loss. It gets very discouraging to lose games when I think we should win and when I think we should really have played better. I start to feel the need to make more plays and I don't know that I can carry that kind of weight. I am preparing myself to call more plays in the huddle for the quarterback and tell him who the primary receiver and secondary receiver should be. This may change our game. It is kind of like my church responsibility in that I just have to step up and take charge, but I am too often relunctant to do so. Maybe I can practise this in football so I can do it in church leadership?