all about Molly

Molly has developed a style of her own over the last year or so.  She loves to wear T-shirts, comfy pants, and hoodies.  She wears my hoodies a lot. She does have a favorite pair of jeans that look nicer that she likes to wear.  I mostly let her wear whatever she picks but I will pick one shirt each week that is my choice.  That way she wears some of my favorites too.  She doesn't complain about this so it seems like a good compromise.  I still comb her hair everyday for school but again, I let her choose and it's usually down and straightened, in a ponytail, or a single braid down the back-not a French braid.

Loves to listen to stories still.  Her long-time favorite has always been storynory.com.  She also enjoys getting books on CD from the library and listening to them every chance she can although I don't let her listen to them when she goes to bed because they don't help her get to sleep!

Molly is a fan of Studio C.  She loves to watch them but my favorite part is to hear her re-tell them to Justin.  She talks so fast that he understands only a small part of what she's saying.  It's funnier to hear her talk about them than it is to watch them, at least for me!  She also likes to watch the twins from cute girls hairstyles who have a youtube channel.  I think they are annoying so I don't encourage this, plus they are on youtube and I am not a fan of letting the kids on youtube.  She watches them not regularly but maybe if she's on vacation from school or something.

This has been the year that Molly has discovered texting.  She loves to use my phone to text either of her grandmas or Chloe.  I have encouraged this, along with the occasional phone call that she likes to do too, because I love the relationship she has with both my mom and April.  And I laugh so hard when I re-read through the texts her and Chloe send back and forth.  The amount of emojis that they use alone takes up a full phone screen sometimes.

Molly has a good appetite and pretty much eats whatever I put in front of her.  She packs a lunch to school most days but likes to eat school lunch once a week.  I think she would eat school lunch everyday but I still prefer packing her a lunch for now.  There are a few things that she doesn't like...rice (which is too bad for her since we eat a lot of rice-she does okay eating it regardless and she doesn't hate it just thinks it doesn't have any flavor), homemade mac and cheese (she prefers the Kraft kind), oatmeal, bran muffins, and she'll eat peanut butter and jelly but never requests it for lunch so not her favorite, but that's about it.  She is very easy to please in the food department.

They test the 4th graders often on their typing skills and Molly continues to improve on her words per minute.  At the last timed test, she scored 89 words per minute!  She's accurate too!

When Molly has a friend over, I can pretty much guarantee that they are going to ask to bake something...usually cupcakes. 

We gave permission for Molly to finish reading the whole Harry Potter series this past summer.  Before I was letting her do one each summer but we figured that she was old enough and mature enough to read them.  She did and she loved them.  We also let her watch the movies...as a reward for reading so many pages!!

Molly was so excited a few years ago to get her ears pierced and she wore her studs religiously up until this past summer when she lost one in my mom and dad's pool.  So now she prefers no earrings.  Justin says I should just let her holes grow back in but I'm not ready to do that so I make her wear earrings once a week to church and don't bother her about them for the rest of the week.

Piano...this is Molly's goal in piano: to learn a song and memorize it as fast as she can.  When she practices she will play said song through as fast as she can.  It about drives me crazy and I'm always nagging on her to keep her eyes off her fingers and on the music so she learns how to read the notes.

Always has to read a book while she gets her hair combed or when she's brushing her teeth.

I wanted to mention Molly's soccer season.  It it a lengthy explanation but we all learned so much through it, especially Molly, so it's important to me that it's documented somewhere.  So let's start with last year's season.  She missed tryouts in May (right after we moved here) and the whole summer season so they placed her on a team in September.  A lot of the team were beginners but Molly connected quickly with them.  She felt confident in her abilities since she was one of the more skilled and experienced players so the adjustment was easy and painless.  She also had two coaches who were amazing and really understood the girls.  The team never won many games but they played hard and learned a lot and showed so much improvement at the end of the year which was in the spring.  And Molly was playing awesome and with so much confidence.  In May, they had try-outs again.  I mentioned before that UYSA had changed the age rules for this year so instead of going by school year, they went by birth year.  So Molly, with her fall birthday, was pushed into the older group of girls and a lot of her teammates were left in the younger group.  That was one thing that made her lose a little of her confidence.  She got a boost in her confidence when she found out that she had made the premier team for the next season.  They started training as soon as school let out and we thought that everything was going well.  We took her to practice and picked her up and she always said practice was great and we believed her.  No one told us otherwise.  The first sign we had that things weren't maybe as great as last year was the 3v3 tournament in July.  We didn't know any of the other girls and her coach was not coaching for the tournament, another mom had stepped in.  Molly played fine, but she was extremely timid and not confident at all.  At one point she did something that caused her team to lose a point and she started to cry, even though it was an innocent mistake.  So we talked to her and moved on.  The next time we saw her play with the team was at the tournament in early August.  Her coach was unable to coach the tournament due to a family emergency with one of her kids so the assistant coach was filling it.  Molly got very little playing time for the whole tournament and she was playing forward which is a position that she never once played the entire last year of soccer.  So it was difficult for me to watch her out there...she was confused, the coach was yelling at her to find her position, and she just jogged around the field.  Even when the ball got close to her she was so unsure of herself that she would just watch it roll by.  It made me so sad to watch that I wanted to cry but we chalked it up to the different coach and a new position.  Fast forward a few more weeks to the regular season and the regular coach, Debbie Winterton.  The first game was in Kaysville so it was a bit of a hassle for me to load up all the kids, pick Molly up from school, and drive that far.  She played a total of 15 minutes (games are two 40 minute halves).  Same story-new position, no confidence, very little playing time.  I was starting to get frustrated but didn't voice my frustrations to anyone.  But the second and third games were similar...Molly continued to be confused with her new position, she had no confidence in herself and her playing time continued to decrease until she was only playing the last 5 minutes of each half.  It got to the point where we were upset and angry and sad and frustrated so Justin finally called Debbie to see what was going on and why Molly wasn't playing.  She laid it all out...Molly had skills, they knew that and that's why they put her on the premier team.  But she lacked confidence, she was not able take criticism or correction from coaches, no matter how nicely it was phrased-she had cried many times at practice when a coach tried to correct her or teach her a new skill or where to be for her position.  So this coach pretty much said that if she comes to warm-ups prior to a game and she doesn't show confidence and an ability to be corrected then she's not going to play.  Well, it was nice to know and even though it was hard to hear and we didn't agree completely with everything (we still thought the only way for her to get confidence and learn was to have more playing time), we appreciated her being open with us.  We wish she would have told us about Molly's struggles earlier but at least it was all out on the table for us to deal with.  So later that night, Justin took Molly out for a date and they had a lengthy talk about what Debbie had said and how they were going to deal with it.  Molly agreed on five things that she would really try hard to work on: be confident, have more energy, make eye contact with the coaches when they ask questions or talk to her, use a loud voice out on the field, and be encouraging to others.  After they talked, they kicked the ball around then went for ice cream before coming home.  Justin later told me that it was a really good conversation and from then on Molly knew the expectations that we had for her and that the coaches had for her.  It required being out of her comfort zone but she said she was up for the challenge.  She really wanted to be successful with this new team.  The other thing that the coaches came up with to help her was for Molly to co-roster with the select team.  This was the lower level team but was being coached by Sierra Heaton who was Molly's coach last year.  We can't say enough positive things about Sierra and her relationship with Molly.  She just understands Molly, they are very similar in personality. We decided to go ahead with the co-roster even though it meant a whole lot more soccer.  If it would boost Molly's confidence, that was what we were wanting.  The hardest part of all of this was watching Molly lose her confidence, it just about broke my heart every single game I had to sit through and watch.  So Molly stuck with her end of the bargain and she started to improve.  The coach noticed and she was given more playing time.  She played with the select team which was a huge confidence booster because she felt like she was a little more skilled (she was and is every bit as good as the girls on the premier team too, she just needed to learn it).  Pretty soon she was our confident Molly and she was even better that the one before.  I don't remember which game it was but a couple of weeks after that, she scored her first goal for the premier team.  Oh man, I will never forget that moment and I maybe held back tears of happiness and tears of "I told you she could do it!"  It was just a really great moment...and each and every goal she scored after that was every bit as great.  She ended up scoring one or two goals in every premier game through the rest of the season.  Her footwork that she only saved for home came out in the games and it is good.  She can fake almost anyone out...she definitely can fake me out!  It was really the ultimate comeback for her.  The season ended on a high note for her and she learned so much about herself and about having confidence in herself even when she doesn't feel completely confident.  She learned how to take criticism and how to take advice and tips from her coaches to make her a better player on the field.  Justin and I were incredibly proud of her and are grateful for the positive way the season ended.  Competition sports are not for everyone, but I don't know how else Molly would learn some of these life skills!  She has been playing on an indoor futsal league that they kind of threw together so we haven't watched her play since October but we are looking forward to watching her in a tournament in March (special invitation from the U12 premier team-a year up from her U11 team) and the regular season which will begin in March or April. 

We love this girl and her beautiful smile who is smart, funny, compassionate, kind, sensitive, the best big sister, and always trying to do what's right.  She teaches me so much and I don't think I could have picked better traits in a daughter if I would have had the chance.  We love her just the way she is and are excited to see what's in store for her!