Rhodes5 in Deutschland: Homecoming... Bitter Sweet

Last week was Homecoming at Bailey and Camden's school. It started off with the Homecoming Dance, then throughout the week they had school spirit days, and it was all followed by the big football game.

I will start with the "bitter" part to this and then finish up with the "sweet" part (just trying to end on a positive note :-) The idea of "Homecoming", is that alumni actually come "home" to celebrate the camaraderie of their earlier years. During half time, they gave a little history of "our" school and I admit, I had a tear(or 2) in my eye. It was really sad, because this was the last football gave EVER for the school. This time next year, the school will not be there (Ok, the building will still be there, but no students) and all of its inhabitants will be shuffled throughout other parts of the world. It is so sad for me to think about.

The school this year, is really small, so in order to even have a football team our guys had to actually be combined with another school about 45 minutes from here to make a team large enough to play. It was nice because they combined the Homecoming Dance with the other school too. The competition for the Homecoming game was against the local German team (and by the way, "Football" to Germans means soccer, so the fact that they even have an "American football" team is very rare). We won the game, but we were all super impressed too by the German Sportsmanship. They had just lost, and knew it was not only our homecoming, but also the last game ever. They rallied around our team for a cheer (oK, maybe "cheer" is not the right word for football payers yelling?) and then had our team run though a formation - so impressive and you could even hear our players talking about the respect they now have for the German team.

We were also really happy for Bailey. She was elected by her class to be the Homecoming Princess for her grade. Again, one of those memories that will stay with her forever!

The game was one of those nights that you really wish you could just bottle up, keep forever and then open periodically at later dates. It was VERY cold, but as I looked around at my 3 kids, they were all so happy. Camden running around with his group of friends, Bailey hanging out with hers, and Mia (well, she wasn't too excited, but she was super happy about the prospect of a sleepover the next day, and of course she had her electronic game to keep her busy :-) When everybody is having a great time, it just seems like all is right in the world!