Wednesday, April 29, 2015

The tendency of mind is ....

Back in December, one of the parents from my daughter's playschool started the initiative of kids soccer. They said they were enrolling their kid to soccer camp starting in April, a 8 week camp played one weekend every week, they suggested if all kids could join in it would be lot of fun. We all got excited with the idea and jumped on it right away.

Since most of us were enrolling, we requested all the kids to be together in the same team. The wonderful folks at the camp honored our request. Even better, some of the dads became the coaches for the team. Keep in mind the whole idea behind was to let kids have fun outside school and some socializing for us too. The kids are truly having fun, specially since the soccer practice ends with donuts and drinks (snacks provided by different parent each week).

It's been 5 weeks, the kids are enjoying the games and having fun. I would definitely say, they have been improving every week, but our team hasn't won a single match. To put it bluntly we get our butts kicked by the opposing team each and every week. We would be lucky if our team makes 1 or 2 goals in the process and don’t self goal during the match.

I think the reason is simple, each team that we have played against so far has 2 to 3 kids who are much older than the kids in our team and also have played multiple years of soccer. If only we hadn’t made the request during enrollment, may be our team would have gotten couple of older kids too and we would be tough competitor too but if that had happened it no longer would have been team “Kangaroos”, would it be?.

Now, the real point of this blog post, I realized I am going away from the original intent of the whole exercise "having fun" and getting to the mode of winning and analyzing why our team isn't doing as good as others.

I think this is called awareness which my good friends were trying to drill into me a decade ago. Of course life is such "aha" moments and that's what makes it fun.The secret is simple, to breath, want more information visit artoflivingaustin.org

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Happy Earth day

I walked to my daughters school for her “Art in the park” day and noticed the following on her class room door.

IMG_1946 IMG_1947

As usual I was impressed by the artistic expressions and impressed with the teachers and their creativity.

Later in the day I heard on KUT that today is “Earth-day”. Now the art made perfect sense.

Great job teachers. I wish I had known this before I would have taken the picture of the entire door.

Sunday, April 05, 2015

Disney on Ice–Frozen

Last summer we took our daughter to watch Disney on ice in Austin. This year took her to Disney on ice frozen, only catch this time it was not in Cedar Park but Alamodome, San Antonio.

This time around it was a bit challenging and needed some prior planning as we now have our puppy Daisy with us, I was on the fence for a long time but thanks to Sandhya, we just decided to wing it.

I remember getting the email back in January itself, they had a total of 8 shows over a weekend (Thursday to Sunday) and by the time we made up our minds all that was left for us was Thursday, rest all were sold out, atleast that's what it said on ticketmaster.com. Our show on Thursday night, barring a few open seats here and there was pretty full.

This was our first event at Alamodome and boy was I impressed by the scale of things. In my mind I kept thinking, 78 miles door-to-door and would need an hour and half for drive and park and get in so should not need more than 2 hours. But the scale of Alamodome is quite a few times higher than our cedar park center, so I should have added an extra hour to make the whole thing more seamless. San Antonio police were stationed to guide the traffic and parking and were doing it very diligently and the staff at Alamodome were quick and efficient too.

Now to the show itself, I had wondered last time itself as to where does Disney find such wonderful ice skaters for its shows. One theory I have is that Disney recruits all the Olympics figure skating rejects for its “on ice” show. Unlike last time which was about a mix of princesses stories, this one specifically was musical story of frozen. It was so well done that Avni who is a big fan of Frozen (dressed up as Elsa but without the wig) barely asked any questions through out the event. I doubt if she even blinked her eyes.

As with anything Disney, it was colorful, energetic, executed to perfection and full of theatrics and special effects.

Most every little girl was dressed up to be Elsa and very few were Anna costumes. Some had taken an extra step to get a blonde hair wigs. One of the attendees I spoke to said, “she felt she had come to Elsa heaven”. 

Door to door it was a total of 6 and half hours venture and well worth it. I forgot to mention, as with everything Disney it's not cheap.