Emily has recently experienced some of what life has to offer as far as highs and lows...well, as high and low as they can get when you're only 8. To her though, the low was devastating.
This past winter she didn't play indoor soccer but she did do a developmental skills program. When it finished, tryouts for the rep soccer team started. This was the first opportunity to play on a rep team, girls turning 9 are the youngest team. She decided she wanted to try out, that she was going to work really hard and she knew that not everyone would make it. Almost 50 girls tried out for 28 spots (two teams of 14). In total, they spent about 7 hours trying out. The last practice was a Wednesday night and they said they would phone by 10 p.m. the following night to let everyone know whether or not they had made it. I was hoping they would phone after she was asleep, in case she didn't make it, I didn't want her to be upset right before bed. Of course though the phone rang at 8 o'clock and one of the assistant coaches (not even the coach which I wasn't terribly impressed about) was sorry to let me know that unfortunately, they didn't have a spot for Emily this year. She was so upset when I told her, it broke my heart. Then to make matters worse one of her friends called her right away hoping she had made the team because they had. Em had such a hard time talking to her without crying and at the end of the conversation she told her friend "good job". I was so proud of her.

Thankfully though after the low point came quite the opposite. One day at work I got a phone call "on behalf of ...... School, we're calling about your daughter". Ok, they really need to find a better way to start their conversations when it's nothing bad because I think my heart did a couple flips in the few seconds it took for her to continue and tell me that she was very pleased to let me know that Emily had won the grand prize in the Jump Rope for Heart draw.
Well, this was the grand prize.....
The reason they called to tell me was so that I could go and pick it up, instead of her having to carry it home on the bus.
The best part of this whole story, and it could only happen to me, was that I had purchased a Wii before Christmas. I got a good deal on it and an extra game was also included but I decided to save it for their birthdays since they're three days apart. So there it was, sitting in my closet, with only a few more weeks to go. When I started laughing and told the lady the story she said that was no problem, that I could return it and get a store credit for the amount they paid for it. So I brought the one out of the closet, passed it off as the one she had won, took the new one back and used the credit to buy some accessories and games for their birthdays! Perfect!

This is not the first time Emily has been lucky enough to win something. Actually, she has probably won more in her eight years than most people win in a lifetime (me included!). This year at school alone, in addition to the Wii she won the main draw at their Scholastic book fair which was $40 to buy books and she also won a Webkinz in another fundraising draw.

When Em was 2 my mother-in-law was selling tickets for a draw their church was having. She bought some and put all her grandkid's names on them. That year Emily won the grand prize....

yes, this beautiful quilt AND she also won third prize which was $100!
The next year, same draw, mother-in-law puts grandkid's names on the tickets again and (I'm not making this up!) Emily wins the grand prize again...ANOTHER quilt!!

That fall when Emily was 3, Tim's Lion's Club was selling hockey pools for the NHL season that year. It consisted of 16 boxes with 4 players in each box. You wanted to pick whoever would get the highest amount of points in the regular season. Just for a joke, I sat down with Em and got her to point at one name in each box and submitted the form in her name even. You see where this is going don't you? Well, she got 39th place out of about 2000 pools and received a cheque for $50! I think it cost $5 to enter.

So, yes, sometimes she's definitely a lucky little girl!